Madam Speaker, I listened with great interest to my colleague from Dartmouth—Cole Harbour and I want to thank him for a very thoughtful and personal speech. I know of his commitment to this area. I know he is the chair of the government caucus on post-secondary education and research. I could tell from his remarks about lifelong learning that he understands there is no way we can take one part of training, for example, apprenticeships or medical training or early childhood development training, out of the system. Somehow we have to build the entire pyramid. It has to go from the best quality of early childhood development to, for example, literacy programs for seniors which the government offers.
The purpose of Bill C-23 is to set up a lifelong learning department which will, first of all, deliver more effectively existing programs. It will develop new programs and integrate programs better. It will work, as my colleague said, with our partners in the provinces and territories, and in the not for profit areas and in the first nations communities and so on, across Canada.
It is really interesting that we do not hear the expression “brain drain” very much in Canada. I can remember only a few years ago when there was an enormous concern in the country about brain drain. My colleague quoted some of the figures now about the level of qualifications of immigrants coming into the country. In the colleges and universities we discover that bright young Canadians who have gone overseas are coming back and bright young people from other jurisdictions are being attracted into Canada to the point where we more often hear criticism of how long it is taking to re-adapt highly qualified immigrants into the system than the fact that we are losing people in a net fashion overseas.
I believe the federal government and its roles in post-secondary education has played a very important part in that. We are now attracting people into Canada, retaining talent that we would otherwise have been losing, and we are trying to build the pyramid from early childhood, or even prenatal programs, through to seniors programs which we need in true lifelong learning.
My colleague mentioned the pan-Canadian approach. He knows better than I that we are in an area of shared jurisdiction and I accept that. I certainly do not want, as one earlier speaker indicated, the federal government, for example, dictating tuition fees in colleges and universities. We cannot do that, but I would like to influence tuition fees. I would like to help students who are faced with tuition fees which are too high. That is what the federal government has been trying to do for many years.
I wonder if my colleague would give us some of his thoughts on how best we can deliver the transfer of money to the provinces for higher education and training, and the programs that we deliver at the present time.