Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for focusing her attention on post-secondary education. It is difficult to talk about all aspects that would be dealt with in the prebudget consultations.
I can recall doing some work on the need for post-secondary education. It showed that the unemployment rate for people who dropped out of high school was somewhere 17%. For people who had high school education, the rate was about 112%. For people who had some post-secondary education, it was down below 10%. For people who had a post-secondary degree or some other skills training, the unemployment rate was probably in the range of about 3% to 5%. It makes some economic sense. This is a knowledge based economy.
The member is also quite right. Even though we have the CHST, that simply for the purpose of calculation. There is no guarantee that the money is actually going into post-secondary education.
Would the member agree that we need to sit down with the provinces to make absolutely sure that when there is an investment from the federal level in post-secondary education, it indeed hits its targets squarely?