I certainly have wonderful expectations and aspirations that there can be opportunities for collaboration. I have sat in on federal meetings in the last few weeks since we lost our program, as well as in provincial meetings. I have heard from representatives of every party, I think.
I think everybody is talking about the same thing. It's a matter of making sure there are ways that those collaborations can fit together. I think the reason both Kirsty and I have mentioned the CNFS as perhaps a model is that we have seen it work well.
When it first came to Laurentian, it mainly was interested in nursing, social work and maybe phys. ed., but over time we have also captured their interest. We created a proposal a few years ago where our francophone program would offer seats to students from other provinces where the other provinces would pay the grant part and maybe the student would pay the tuition part. They would be extra to our cohort of 30. We had provincial buy-in, we had federal buy-in and we had the individual potential student buy-in. Unfortunately, there was a change in the government at the time. Although the committee itself had found that we scored very highly on their priority list and we thought we may be going ahead with that, the funding to CNFS that year got cut and the program never actually happened.
I think that's an example of how the CNFS doesn't tread on provincial toes. It supplements provincial toes. I think we may be able to look at other possibilities for indigenous students, racialized students and for the north that would have the same kind of structure that's a partnership between a post-secondary institution and the federal government, but always with the co-operation of the provinces to make it work.