Finance committee  --as to whether we are spending enough money on post-secondary education. If you don't know what that level is, it's very difficult to make that decision.

Finance committee  Sure. In the brief we're referring to the federal transfers that help fund the core operating costs of the universities. The research envelope is separate. The difficulty is--

Finance committee  No, it did exist in the 1990s as well. There's been a significant increase in research funding, but the problem has been that the core operating costs of universities have borne the price of that, and they haven't seen an increase. They've seen a real reduction, which has led to rising tuition fees and the problems with student debt that we've seen.

Finance committee  Certainly we've recommended, and I think the government's taken the first step towards, disentangling the health transfer from the social transfers, but we would certainly be in favour of having a separate post-secondary transfer, just mainly for accountability and transparency reasons.