Madam Speaker, my colleague talks about working with provinces and stakeholders. Of all those stakeholders, not one person has come out and said that the Canadian Council on Learning should have been cut, not one.
Not one province has said that. About the only thing the provinces were aligned with completely was that the CCL was working and that the millennium scholarship fund, something else they cancelled, was working.
However, we should think about what we do not have. Think about the economics of not having any quality assurance agency in place. Think about all the economies in the world that we are competing with. Now some of the emerging economies that used to send their students here are keeping them at home. All of the countries are saying, “Not only are we going to invest in education, but we are going to study where we are. We are going to see how we are doing and we are going to find a way to make it better”.
Canada is the only one that refuses to have a plan. This was the plan. This was the road map to a more educated Canada, at a better price, more economic.
If the government does not believe in supporting students, ideologically, that is one thing; but at the very least, it should say, “We need to know how we are doing; we need to know what we are spending”. We cannot even determine how much is being spent on education in Canada because the provinces do not all talk to each other about these sorts of things. We need to find this stuff out. The Canadian Council on Learning was doing it.
I want to pay tribute to Paul Cappon, who was continuing to do some work, even though the funding has gone.
It is a shame that we are entering a new information age and we are doing it without any information at all. Canadian students, who are the future of this country, are the ones who are going to suffer.