Thank you.
Thank you, Lisa.
Lisa has been doing a great job leading that program.
I don't have a lot of speaking notes. I was heavily involved through the CCAA process as the president of the staff union.
When it comes to midwifery programs, there's a lot of confusion. There are a lot of questions unanswered. You heard from Ms. Morgan that the enrolment has been exactly what it's supposed to be. It has hit its target every year.
What we are very confused about is the actual building of barriers in 2021. We feel like this is a situation where, because of a decision that has been made.... These decisions that were made through this process were about dollars and cents. The functionality of the institution, or the functionality of servicing women in the north, was not part of this discussion, and it should have been.
If you look at some of the midwife programs in the north.... I was lucky enough for two of my children to have midwives, and I was even luckier that I had the same two midwives both times. Xavier was the last baby that one of them, Meghann, delivered. She went up north to work in Timmins. I think it's called the Boreal Midwifery Practice, and both of the people who work there in Timmins are Laurentian graduates, to my knowledge.
If the program wasn't based here in Sudbury at Laurentian University, would there be a practice in Timmins? I don't think there would be. That's the precise reason that having a midwifery program down south is fantastic, but it does not service the north. There is a significant number of indigenous students and francophone students.
You will see that we have an indigenous learning centre. In that centre, there are specific rooms that are designed just with a phone and a booth. That's because indigenous students feel disconnected because they are not in their communities. The idea that you would now ask indigenous students to go to southern Ontario is going to create significant barriers, barriers that were supposed to be, over years, brought down.
When you look at the system, and I'm sure Ms. Morgan would talk much better about it than I would, you see there's a lottery to get into the program. There's a separate lottery specific for francophone and indigenous students. That's about taking down barriers. That's about making sure that people have access to the things they need to have access to in the north. A decision like this in 2021.... I am baffled by the idea that we would be moving away from servicing northern Ontario, which this decision has done.
We've asked several times why this is happening. For other programs they would give us the reasons they made those decisions, but there was nothing they could tell us about the midwifery program. We kept saying this is an envelope of funding. It hits a target every year. It's a good program. It's servicing the north. How is this on the list of programs to be cut? The only real excuse they gave us was that the funding could dry up one day, and then they'd be stuck with people.... They wouldn't be in a CCAA process where, as you know, there are a lot of things you can do. If you exit people out of the institution, there is no severance, or it's caught up in a claims process.
My concern is that they took advantage of a point in time. They ignored northern Ontario by doing so and created a massive barrier for this specific program that really does, if you heard Ms. Morgan, significantly service the north.