I have a couple of reflections on that. Thank you for the question.
I think Canadians across the country can be proud of the commitment to making sure that every qualified student gets a good undergraduate experience. The level of financial support for undergraduate students has actually changed considerably.
I want to do a shout-out to the government here. In the early days of the pandemic, when everything was scary, the government did dramatic things on the student financial assistance file to give hope to students and to give confidence to parents that the educational journey could continue. Canada is exceptional—our enrolment actually went up, our retention went up and our completion went up. This is convocation season, and we have 250,000 Canadians graduating this spring who are ready to put their shoulder to the wheel for Canada.
The challenge is at the graduate level. That's where people fall off the cliff. The level of support is just not there. As I said earlier, opportunities elsewhere are very attractive. I never want to create a panic about a brain drain, just as you don't want to create a run on the bank, but I'm telling you today that the conditions are very similar to what we saw in the early 1990s. It took over a decade and billions of dollars to patch that brain drain and bring talent back to Canada.
We can act now and make sure we're positioned into the future, or we can spend another year telling graduate students, “Well, maybe next year”, and telling principal researchers, “Yes, I know Japan is doing this, and I know the U.K. is doing this, and someday we might have an agreement with another country.”