Madam Speaker, my colleague mentioned that I am the chair of the post-secondary caucus on education. He would probably also agree that I replaced someone of inestimable intelligence and dedication to the cause who is very hard to replace. This is an issue of great significance to me because he mentioned the case of post-secondary education in Canada and we have to look at that.
In my role as chair of the post-secondary education caucus, I have the opportunity to speak to students, university presidents and faculty. One thing that they all say is that they appreciate the fact that Canada has invested heavily in post-secondary education, specifically in the area of research where we are now the highest supporters of publicly funded research in the G-8. That has really sustained universities at a time when provincial funding has been withdrawn.
His specific question was how do we get at the whole area of post-secondary education? I personally support the idea of the dedicated transfer, a Canada education transfer, so to speak, which would do two things. It would demand accountability from all people and it would provide a framework from which we could decide what kind of education framework we want in the post-secondary environment.
Most Canadians do not realize that the federal government commitment to post-secondary education is in the order of $9 billion a year when we take into account the huge amounts of money that have gone into research as well as transfers to the province, as well as student loans and grants. That is a huge amount of money that Canadians do not know about but should know. A dedicated transfer would let people know where their money is coming from for education. We could move to the very important issue of access because that is the next great challenge that we have in education.
We have great universities. We just need to ensure that they get supported not just by the federal government but also by provincial governments as well as all Canadians.