Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs,
Science and Technology
Subcommittee on Post-Secondary education
Issue 10 - Evidence - Morning sitting
Halifax, Wednesday, February 19, 1997
The Subcommittee on Post-Secondary education of the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, met this day at 9:00 a.m. to continue its inquiry into the state of Post-Secondary education in Canada.
Senator M. Lorne Bonnell (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Senators and presenters, this is our second day of hearings here in Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia.We are resuming our inquiry concerning the serious state of Post-Secondary education in Canada, which was referred by the Senate of Canada to the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology. That committee set up a subcommittee, and we are here in Halifax today. The Order of Reference reads as follows:
That, while respecting provincial constitutional responsibilities, the Committee be authorized to examine and report upon the state of Post-Secondary education in Canada, including the review of:
(a) the national, regional, provincial and local goals of the Canadian Post-Secondary educational system;
(b) the social, cultural, economic and political importance of post-secondary EDUCATION to Canada;
(c) the roles of the federal, provincial and territorial governments;
(d) the ability of Canadian universities and colleges to respond to the new, emerging EDUCATIONal marketplace including the changing curriculum and new technologies; distance, continuing and co-operative EDUCATION, and adult and part-time EDUCATION; and
(e) the Canada Student Loans Program and the different provincial and territorial student financial assistance programs as well as the growing concern over student indebtedness;
and to identify areas of greater cooperation between all levels of government, the private sector and the EDUCATIONal institutions;
That the committee have power to engage the services of such counsel and technical, clerical and other personnel as may be necessary for the purposes of its examination;
That the committee have power to sit during sittings and adjournments of the Senate;
That the committee adjourn from place to place in Canada when it begins its examination;
That the committee be authorized to permit coverage by the electronic media on its public proceedings of the examination, with the least possible disruption of its hearings;
That the committee submit its final report no later than February 28, 1997; and
That, notwithstanding usual practices, if the Senate is not sitting when the final report of the committee is completed, the committee shall deposit its report with the Clerk of the Senate, and said report shall thereupon be deemed to have been tabled in the Senate.
We have an extension to May 15 from February 28 as we were unable to report that quickly.
We have with us this morning Dr. David Cameron and Mr. Daniel Godbout from the Maritime Provinces Higher EDUCATION Commission.
Dr. David Cameron, Interim Chairman, Maritime Provinces Higher EDUCATION Commission: Honourable Senators, my name is David Cameron. It is my considerable honour to be interim chair of the Maritime Provinces Higher EDUCATION Commission. With me is Daniel Godbout, who is the chief operating officer of the commission. I would like to make a few opening comments but leave ample time for questions and discussion.
First of all, a word about the commission. It is a unique institution in Canada, established in 1973 by identical acts of the three maritime provinces. It was established to advise the three governments and the universities, with the objective of improving efficiency and effectiveness of higher EDUCATION in the maritime provinces. The commission is made up of representatives of the higher EDUCATION institutions, including students, of the public at large and of government.
I should perhaps add that my remarks this morning and the brief we have submitted to you reflect the views of the commission and not necessarily those of the government we advise. I am aware of at least one recommendation that has caused some consternation amongst the provinces. You can read all about it in The Globe and Mail this morning.
I would like to focus my remarks on three areas of particular concern to the commission. We provide a fairly substantial body of data and analysis in our brief. It includes some 17 specific recommendations for your consideration. As I say, I would like to focus initially on three major areas. All three of these areas do, however, arise as a consequence of the current, past and future rposttions in government expenditures, both federal and provincial. We do understand the problem of the deficit and the debt facing Canada. We are concerned, however, that some of the actions respecting post-secondary EDUCATION may have hit our universities and colleges particularly and disproportionately hard.
It is our view that Post-Secondary education does constitute an investment in our future, in the future of individuals, and in our collective future as a society. We believe we need to be very careful that we do not, as a result of short term measures to balance budgets, yield long-term consequences which we will later regret. It will, indeed, be hard to change our course once we have eroded the foundation of higher or Post-Secondary education.
Our first concern then is with what has been happening with respect to tuition fees and particularly the consequences of increased fees for student debt. We watched, over the last few years, the proportion of university funding represented by fees rise from some 14 to 28 per cent of university operating budgets. We have seen in the maritimes the average tuition fee rise in the last ten years from about $1,700 to nearly $3,000. The maritimes remain with average fees amongst the highest in Canada.
What we are witnessing here is the bulk of funding withdrawn from higher EDUCATION by governments being made up by increased tuition. Coupled with difficulties in obtaining remunerative summer employment, we have now created a situation in which students have virtually no choice but to borrow the bulk of the cost of a Post-Secondary education, including, but of course by no means limited to, tuition fees.
Some ten years ago, the average level of student aid in the maritimes was some $2,700, of which $900 came in the form of a bursary, non-repayable. Today, as of 1994/95, that amount has doubled to $5,800, all of which, except for a modest $300 in the case of New Brunswick, now comes in the form of loans.
Our concern is that we really do not know the long-term consequences of these increases in fees and the massive increase in student borrowing. We do not know what their ability will be to repay these loans. We do not know the consequences of debt loads that can now easily exceed $20,000 on graduation from a single four year undergraduate program. We do not know what those consequences are for individuals, for their families, or indeed on the economy. That is a major debt with which to start out life at work. We do not know what the implications are for enrolment. So far, enrolment is holding up despite increased tuition, but there is a general feeling that we may well be on the edge of a precipice. We may be starting down a slippery slope, and that will only rebound to make things worse if tuition fees increase while enrolment decreases. We just do not know.
We were delighted to hear of the budget announcements yesterday and the extent to which the federal government will be providing additional relief to students, both through income tax savings and forgiveness period in the case of difficulties in repaying loans, but we are still stabbing in the dark.
The commission itself has embarked on a major study of barriers to accessibility, focusing, in part, on financial barriers. We should have that report completed within the next two months. We would be happy to send you a copy since we should have it before you conclude your report.
Indeed, barriers to accessibility constitute our second major concern. Post-Secondary education in Canada, as your terms of reference indicate, Mr. Chairman, has been, since virtually the Second World War, a federal-provincial partnership. We recognize provincial constitutional responsibilities in this area, and we recognize also that the federal government has played an important role in the support of various aspects of Post-Secondary education.
We are very concerned about the barriers we see emerging as between provinces; for example, the move by Quebec to impose out-of-province fees. While we understand the particular circumstances in that province, and its success over the years in holding fees well below the national average, we think this an ominous development, that, for the first time, we now have a government charging Canadian students who come from out of province more than students from within the province. We hope the consequences of this will not spread to other provinces, but this is a development we think of serious potential consequences.It is not good for students and it is not good for Canada, and we think that this matter ought to be of major concern, at least to the federal government.
We have made what has turned out to be a fairly controversial recommendation, that the federal government give serious consideration to imposing penalties on provinces that charge higher out-of-province fees. Mobility of students, both within and across provincial boundaries, is unquestionably a matter of federal concern.
Our third area of major concern has to do with research. Research constitutes the one certain key to economic growth and prosperity. Yet through actions taken in the recent past by governments at both levels, we are in danger of strangling the goose that lays the golden economic eggs. There is a major problem with research infrastructure in Canada. Again, we were delighted to read of the proposed Canada Foundation for Innovation in Mr. Martin's budget, but the problem goes deeper than a single initiative, however praiseworthy this one is.
The unique federal-provincial partnership that applies to research yields a kind of double jeopardy for research-intensive universities. As you know, the federal government limits its support of sponsored research to what we know as the direct costs, leaving the infrastructure or indirect costs of that research to be met from other sources within the institutions and in provincial funding. Cuts in federal transfer payments thus complicate and worsen the situation resulting from cuts in federal grants themselves because they constrain yet further the ability of provinces and universities to cover the indirect costs that are not yet paid out by the federal granting agencies.
In a have-not province, as with all three maritime provinces, this is a double burden in the sense that the cost of research to the province is increasing as the federal government rpostes its funding, leaving an even larger proportion than before on the provincial governments and the institutions.
In provinces like ours, where we lack the strength of research in the private sector that applies in some other provinces, we are disproportionately dependent on universities for research and development activities. Without the robust private sector, we are triply burdened by cuts in federal research funding.
To complicate that yet further, we are not certain that the federal government is altogether cognizant of the overall impact of cuts across departments which are, played out, in a number of cases, in terms of rposttions in federal research through agencies having jurisdiction with respect to Agriculture, Fisheries, Transportation, et cetera. The little non-university-based research that we do have, in other words, is dependent on federal support, and that has been rposted in recent years over and above cuts to the granting councils and cuts in transfer payments to the provinces.
Those are our immediate and major concerns, honourable senators. We are concerned about rising tuition, particularly about the burden that imposes on students in terms of debts, and the unknown future we are embarking on as we shift to a considerable extent our national debt on to the backs of individual graduates.
We are concerned with what we see developing in terms of barriers between the provinces, both in terms of out-of-province fees -- and again we acknowledge the uniqueness of Quebec's situation -- and barriers in the form of residency requirements for student aid. We are concerned about research and the importance of research to economic development, especially in this part of Canada, and the complex and compounded effects of recent cuts in federal support of research.
We laud the Finance Minister and the Prime Minister for what has been done in the budget. We urge that those steps continue and that we re-establish the level of investment in Post-Secondary education and continue it on an adequate and stable basis within the partnership of the federal and provincial governments that has marked the strength of Post-Secondary education in Canada.
Mr. Godbout and I would be more than happy to speak further on any points of interest to you or to answer any questions.
The Chairman: Dr. Cameron, you are representing the maritime provinces. What is the reason why Newfoundland is not participating with the maritime provinces? Is it that you do not like Newfoundland, or did Newfoundland not want to join with you as Atlantic Canada?
Mr. Cameron: Mr. Godbout may wish to elaborate on this point, but it is simply a fact of history that when the commission was established under the Council of Maritime Premiers, following the report of the Maritime Union Study, Newfoundland on each of those occasions chose not to participate. There is now a parallel body, the Atlantic Premiers, and the four Atlantic ministers of EDUCATION do meet regularly but they have not yet seen fit to transform the commission into an Atlantic body. It may happen in the future but right now we speak to the three provinces.
The Chairman: So something will be set up to consider the economic situation of the Atlantic provinces?
Mr. Cameron: The Atlantic premiers do meet on a regular basis, yes.
The Chairman: Do they have a whole government set up? It seems we have a third level of bureaucracy now in Atlantic Canada wasting the taxpayers' money by having the provincial government which, God knows, is small enough. Then to have a maritime government which has more bureaucracy, which used to cost a few dollars and now costs millions. Is the same thing happening in maritime EDUCATION?
Mr. Cameron: Which one of those you think is excessive depends on where you sit. We on the commission tend to think that one body for three provinces is more effective and efficient than three bodies, one for each province. That is a subject of ongoing discussion amongst the provinces.
We get along very well. There is a good working relationship between provincial departments and the commission.
The Chairman: We have a Senator here from Quebec, Senator Lavoie-Roux, who would like to ask you a few questions concerning students who go to Quebec and pay extra tuition to do so.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Although I was not in favour of this increase, it should not be viewed as a great tragedy. I think that you are aware, even with the increase, that it is still cheaper for students from Ontario to study at McGill than it is to study at University of Toronto. I repeat, I was not for it.
Mr. Cameron: I should underscore again that it is not specifically the actions of the Government of Quebec that concerns us. It is the establishment of a principle that we think is wrong for the provinces generally.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: I am glad you did underscore it. First of all, I want to thank you for your report, which I will be reading more carefully. There is data in it which will be very useful.
The two main problems that have been brought repeatedly to our attention, whether we are out west or in the maritimes, are under funding of research and the problem of the fees, student loans and the indebtedness of the student.
Yesterday, in the budget, two measures to help students were mentioned: Instead of being able to dpostt $100, students would be able to dpostt $200. I am unsure of the exact amount of the dposttion. The second one I know more clearly, which was to extend the period prior to repayment. Let us say they had 18 months before starting to repay. Now they will have 30 months. I might be incorrect here.
I am not sure that is such a good thing. Maybe students will be relieved because they have 30 months before they begin to pay, but they will pay interest for a longer period, too. I do not know how that can have any effect on the indebtedness of students.
Mr. Cameron: I think it is more substantial than that, virtually doubling the amount in tuition fees that can be taken as a tax credit on income tax.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: That is why I wanted to know.
Mr. Cameron: There are also changes in registered EDUCATION savings plans, all of which are included in the package of recommendations we make in this brief, so we are delighted to see that Mr. Martin accepted our recommendations even before we made them, for which we will take all the credit we can.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: In Quebec, student debt ranges from $7,000 to $10,000 a year. Will the changes provide any relief for these students?
Mr. Cameron: All of these things help. These changes will help future generations of students save up for their Post-Secondary education. They will help relieve the burden of higher tuition. They will help students in repaying loans, but the practice of requiring that students borrow the money first and then the government relieves the paying back of it will continue. The burden of the debt will remain. It will just be slightly less painful.
We would very much like to see more rigorous efforts made to rposte the level of debt in the first place, but that would require more money than governments have found available thus far.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: We had heard prior to the budget that something would be done for Post-Secondary education. I suppose each little thing can help, but with reference to what we have heard in these hearings, the problem is so much more serious than extending repaying the debt from 20 months to 30 months or whatever. As I say, it will add interest charges by virtue of the longer period. That is all.
Mr. Cameron: To some extent, I, for one, think these policies can be supported in the sense that those in the upper income brackets with children in university probably can afford to make a larger contribution towards the EDUCATION costs of their children, but what has to worry us is the effects of this on the non-affluent graduates who do not have wealthy parents to fall back on.
The proportion of students dependent on federal and provincial student aid in the maritimes is particularly high. Indeed, they can come out with debts that far exceed the total wealth of their parents, in terms of the mortgage value of their home, for example. If there are three or four children in a family and debts of that nature, that is a real burden. We are concerned that we may be at, or at least close to, the limit of the ability of many students to hold and repay loans of the magnitude that they are now being required to assume.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: How many young people are kept away from post-secondary school on account of the costs that attendance will entail later on?
Mr. Cameron: That is what we do not know. Statistics Canada, because of the lag in doing their studies, can tell us quite a bit about students who graduated four years ago, but not the accumulated impact of recent increases. We will be looking at that specifically in the study we have commissioned. We hope to be able to say something in a couple of months about the impact on students of tuition levels and total costs and borrowing.
One clue as to what may be happening is that while enrolment is holding steady, the total amount of student borrowing has decreased very slightly in the maritime provinces. We fear that this may be the thin edge of the wedge, that poor students are not going to university in as many numbers as wealthier students. We are very afraid we will return to a 19th century elitist post-secondary system that Canada has worked so hard to move beyond in the post-war period. The commission believes this would be a very retrograde step.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Do you have figures for or do you hear of students who drop out of university because the burden of being so financially squeezed discourages them and is so stressful that they simply have to walk out?
Mr. Cameron: We have only anecdotal evidence at this point. We understand from economists that, despite the cost of a higher EDUCATION, it still is for the individual student a good investment in terms of employment levels, income levels after graduation.
We did a survey this year of the circumstances in which last year's graduates are finding themselves. It is quite impressive, the extent to which they expressed satisfaction with their post-secondary experience and the evidence that their employment levels are far higher than for the population generally. At this point we cannot say we have much systematic evidence. However, we are very concerned that it is only just now beginning to emerge, and that if we keep on the path we are on, the situation will become quite serious.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: On page 2 of your report you have a table showing unemployment rates by level of EDUCATION, and we have been given more or less similar figures or along the same line. Close to 6 per cent of people with university degrees are unemployed, which is not great stimulation for the ones who have to fight to borrow money and struggle to enter post-secondary colleges and universities. This 6 per cent figure is very high. The figure is 5.7, to be precise.
Mr. Cameron: Of course, that hides the extent of under-employment as well, the proportion of graduates who have jobs but jobs well below the qualifications that they hold.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Do you know the percentage for people who have graduated from university in a specific field and are working in another field?
Mr. Cameron: We have considerable information on that area for the maritime provinces, and we would be happy to share the results of our survey. It was done in 1996, of students who graduated in 1995. It does not cover the rest of Canada but you could add them to those of Statistics Canada.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: I think in Quebec they have similar statistics, too. It would be interesting to have them.
Senator Forest: With regard to the initiatives taken in the budget, I think we all hoped there would be more. I want to point out, with respect to the loan repayment, that the period will go up to 30 months. Since students already have six months, that means they will have up to three years. During those three years, the government will pick up the interest on the loans, so students will not have to pay interest on the loans for those first three years. Therefore, that is an improvement.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: They did not say that yesterday in the budget. They said there would be an extension of the period.
Senator Andreychuk: Six more months.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Whatever number of months.
The Chairman: We can argue about the budget somewhere else.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: All the students who have appeared before us, or their representatives, have said that they had to pay interest on their loans and that that was a big burden. Are you saying that now they will no longer have to pay interest on their loans.
The Chairman: I think if you read a copy of the budget, you will find out that Senator Forest is correct.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: That is an important statement.
Senator Forest: I think it is. I wanted to speak further about the mobility of students from one province to another. Everywhere we have been, students have expressed the concerns that, first of all, their credits be transferable, second, that their loans be transferable.
Concern has been expressed about the increased fees being levied by the Government of Quebec against out-of-province students, as you have mentioned. However, as Senator Lavoie-Roux has said, Quebec has had very low fees and they have also had, I think, perhaps the best loan program, so that is good. We are concerned, however, that Canadian students from other provinces may in some cases pay more than foreign students.
Also, Alberta, B.C., and I think Ontario have taken a slap on their wrists, as they should, for not allowing their loans to be portable. I agree with that. I think they should be portable.
Alberta also took a hit because of their approach to Medicare, but there were health care guidelines that allowed the federal government to say, "These are the guidelines. Under these conditions, you get these grants, and if you do not abide by the conditions, you do not get them."
What would you suggest to improve the mobility of students, the transfer of their credits and loans? What would you suggest as a vehicle that would allow the federal government to make that happen, at the same time respecting the autonomy of the provinces with regard to their responsibility for EDUCATION and the diversity of their programs?
Mr. Cameron: We draw your attention, in fact, to the parallel you have just made between Medicare and federal transfers, and we raise as a possibility that adopting a similar principle in Post-Secondary education might be considered, that there would be a penalty imposed on provinces that establish barriers to mobility. There is still a fair chunk of cash which goes from the federal government to the provinces. That was of specific concern, that a large cash portion remain in order to make possible the imposition of concerns in relation to Medicare.
We have not worked out the details. We simply commend for your consideration the possibility that there might be a parallel mechanism in the case of Post-Secondary education that would enable a rposttion in the transfer of funds from the federal government proportionate to the erection of financial barriers to student mobility by a province.
Senator Forest: That is in your report.
Mr. Cameron: Yes.
Senator Forest: We have not had the opportunity to read it yet.
Mr. Cameron: I think it is recommendation number 7.
Senator Andreychuk: I commend you on having such a commission because, the more research, the greater our appreciation of the problems in EDUCATION. There is a lot of feeling and myth going around about some of the problems. I thank you for the statistics going back to 1982, because we have people talking about the situation today without having anything to which to relate it.
However, some academics tell me that the 30 per cent level of tuition vis-à-vis the rest of the cost of operating the university is, in fact, the same as what most universities had in place in the 1950s and 1960s. What was envisioned was that students would pay a fair share of the investment in their own EDUCATION. It was set at about one-third of the cost of university. That expense was offset by bursaries for students, by the ability to get a pretty good part-time job and summer employment, and the prospect of getting a pretty good job when you graduated.
I am interested in your comments as to whether, in fact, way back in the days of real dollars, students had higher tuitions that were mitigated by offsetting abilities to get employment.
Second, do you believe that what is missing in Canada is an approach to EDUCATION that takes in all of these factors for students? We seem to be very irregular. Tuitions go up and down. We have student loans, but there is no concerted effort to look at what the investment should be and how it should be managed.
Mr. Cameron: I could not say it as well myself. There is certainly evidence that, in constant dollar terms, tuition fees are, only now, crossing the threshold that they were at in the 1950s, when tuition peaked at about one-third the cost. In that sense, you are quite right. However, not only do we have to recognize the additional costs and the demise of opportunities for students to earn through the summer enough to pay their tuition and other costs, but that, increasingly, students are working part-time through the academic year, which can only mean that they do not have the same amount of energy to apply to their studies. They are working four, five, six hours a day quite frequently.
We have cut out most, and in some provinces all, of the bursary component of student aid so that it all now goes into loans. We cannot forget and simply turn our backs on the enormous progress we made as a result of the expansion of Post-Secondary education through the 1960s and 1970s, not just via lower tuition but the expansion of the whole college sector, creating a whole new range of opportunity, and the effect that had on accessibility. Do we really want to go back to a time as recent as the 1950s, when fees were relatively high but a very small proportion of the population went to university?
It is not surprising that there were enormous benefits for those who did go to university in the 1950s, but we think it would be very retrograde now to go back. Yes, we are trying to argue the case for a comprehensive partnership between the federal and provincial governments addressing the whole gamut of financing Post-Secondary education, including student aid, the funding of research and the funding of institutional infrastructure as well.
Senator Andreychuk: Would it be fair to say that until we do something comprehensive we will only make a small dent in a very large problem that is increasing?
Mr. Cameron: I think that is right. Small dents are better than big holes. We would applaud the progress that is being made. We would urge you to go farther and faster.
Mr. Daniel Godbout, Chief Operating Officer, Maritime Provinces Higher EDUCATION Commission: Out of interest, for the benefit of the subcommittee, Appendix 2 gives you some indication of what percentage tuition represents in the general operating revenues of universities.
Senator Andreychuk: That brings me to research and development. You indicated the problems because of the small business base from which you work. This problem is not unique to the maritime provinces. In other words, it applies across this country of 30 million people spread over the second largest land mass of any country in the world. Our corporate base is rather small. We are unique in that we have many of the basic components of research within universities, and it would be folly to think that businesses could somehow take up the slack. For example, what we are doing in biotechnology is a good step and maybe there will be more innovation, but many of us do not really understand how our universities have played a role in that field. How can we get around that situation, if I am right?
Mr. Cameron: You are right. There is ample data, especially from the OECD, demonstrating that Canada as a whole is quite out of line with other industrialized countries in our dependence on universities for research.
The maritime provinces are even more dependent than the rest of Canada. One of the things we often hear is that the universities that are able to compete in this realm are getting fewer and fewer. Some people suggest we may soon be down to ten to a dozen. Part of our concern is that at least one of those ought to be in the maritimes because, as a region, these provinces simply will lose a huge competitive advantage if there is not at least one or two research-intensive institutions in the region.
Senator Andreychuk: Much of the corporate research dollars that have gone into partnerships have really centred around large universities or unique programs. When we, as a country, start to realize that our problem is not with large corporations but small and medium-sized businesses, what would you suggest as an incentive for research in small and medium universities so that they get their fair share in balance with large universities?
Mr. Cameron: We, in our report, do cite a few examples, including Prince Edward Island -- provinces do not get any smaller than that -- of successful partnerships between a university and the private sector. UPEI may be relatively small, and has traditionally focused on undergraduate EDUCATION, but it also has the Regional Veterinary Centre and does fundamental and applied research in that area.
Part of the justification for our own commission is the extent to which we are able to rationalize EDUCATION in the three provinces and focus on areas of strength in each province so that we minimize the duplication amongst the universities. We are not suggesting you have to be big to be competitive but you do have to be focused.
We think efforts by the federal government, for example, to build partnerships between its own research enterprises and universities to reward partnership developments between universities and the private sector is one way in which the federal government can help enormously to lever those kinds of focused programs and partnership arrangements.
[Translation]
Senator Losier-Cool: I have two questions or comments regarding pages 13 and 15 of your report. On page 13, mention is made of a maritime survey of 1995 graduates. I taught in the secondary school system in New Brunswick. I know that the young people in the province are quite resourceful because 64 per cent of them claimed personal responsibility for the cost of their EDUCATION. Reference is also made to the parents' financial situation. In the first paragraph on page 13, mention is made of the Shippegan campus where students, for the most part, took responsibility for their own EDUCATION costs. A comparison is made with other English universities in Atlantic Canada. How do these students compare with other students in Canada? Can you provide me with an answer?
[English]
Mr. Cameron: The short answer is no.
Senator Losier-Cool: Good. I like short answers.
Mr. Cameron: A study was commissioned just in the three maritime provinces. Periodically, Statistics Canada does some of this, but only periodically, and there is no comparable data for graduates as recent as 1995, so we are ahead of the rest of the country in terms of having this information. Some provinces and universities conduct such surveys. I know British Columbia, for example, does a regular survey of graduates, and there may be others. It is not entirely comparable and it would be a huge advantage to all of us if we could tie this kind of thing more closely with Statistics Canada.
[Translation]
Senator Losier-Cool: This brings me to my second question which pertains to a comment about research on page 15. You stress the importance of research and no one disagrees with you. Has the Maritime Provinces Higher EDUCATION Commission or the various Atlantic provinces given any thought to a possible research project? I do not think that we can continue to call for research into the fishery issue because there are no longer any fish. Everyone knows that.
You saw in yesterday's budget that a component had been set aside for tourism. Research at the federal level into eco-tourism could prove to be an innovative initiative. It might lead to jobs and help our graduates. Our region is still lovely and not yet polluted. Something else came to mind when you spoke of graduates. What kind of contribution will they be making to the economy? It would be interesting to see what kind of economic contribution indebted graduates make to society. I am asking you all of these questions because in the course of our discussions yesterday and of our meetings with students, this topic was discussed. I would like to know if you have a research project in mind?
[English]
Mr. Cameron: I would certainly be hesitant to suggest specific research projects. I think it is better if those emerge through partnerships and discussions between researchers and consumers of the research. We have not had much luck with trying to commission research that does not fit the needs of the private sector and does not consume the imagination of researchers. We surely do not need second-rate research.
I understand that, yet again, in the budget yesterday was a proposal for the Canada Foundation for Innovation which, if I understand it correctly, will be of enormous benefit in this area, that, in fact, it will be an endowed fund that will provide some $80 million or so a year in additional funding for research. If it is responsive to the needs of researchers and industry and fosters the kind of innovative and collaborative work that we are talking about, it will be a huge benefit.
I would settle at the moment for recommending that we stop the erosion of the base that is currently going on. We are moving backwards as opposed to forwards. We are making it increasingly difficult for universities, for example, to compete for the research money that is available. We are not investing in our young people to go into careers in innovation research and development as we cut back in research. We have lost the federal program that encouraged young women to go into areas of advanced study and research that have not traditionally appealed to women. These are all retrograde steps. If we could stop that erosion, it would be major progress.
Senator Losier-Cool: The purpose of my comment mostly is I want someone to take the leadership and to say, "This is what we want to do our research on."
Mr. Cameron: I am cautioning you not to go too far down that road because our experience with trying to call the shots from a distance has not been very encouraging. You have to get down on the shop floor, in a sense, to understand what kind of research is appropriate in a given university in a given area. If you ask the universities, they are full of ideas of the research that would benefit their local communities, their provincial communities, their region, and the whole of Canada, if the funding were available.
Senator Losier-Cool: So universities would do it.
Mr. Cameron: Oh, yes, absolutely.
Senator Andreychuk: We have centres of excellence and now we have in the budget a Foundation for Innovation. Will these be different or are these starting measures towards recognizing research and excellence?
Mr. Cameron: They are both wonderful ideas. The network of centres of excellence is a uniquely imaginative approach of having research centre around particular programs but involving researchers from a variety of universities that do not necessarily host the network centre, a great idea, uniquely Canadian and appropriate to Canada.
As you have said, we are stretched out over a huge distance. This allows some groups to come together despite that distance. However, while we are doing those things, we are cutting back on the mainstream support of research. So we give with the left hand and take away with the right hand.
Senator Perrault: Mr. Chairman, we have heard horror stories on this tour of Canada from students who say they have debt loads of up to $40,000. You have rightly targeted this as one of the main problems. Have you ever considered the concept of community work to help meet these loan obligations? It certainly has been considered in the United States and other jurisdictions.
Mr. Cameron: This is a question with a great deal of potential. This idea emerged in the panel's report in which I participated in Ontario. My own university here, Dalhousie, is now the leading university in Canada in terms of packaging support to students with money in effect reallocated from tuition and endowment sources.
It is a common practice in particularly private universities in the United States that the institution will put together a package of student support that may indeed involve employment, and particularly where that involves a student working in a lab in their own area or serving as a teaching assistant or working in the library It not only provides them with some funding, but it gives them an opportunity to work in a way that is both useful to the university and important to their own EDUCATION.
I understand that during the recent election in Prince Edward Island, one of the political parties had a scheme to involve high school graduates in a program of community work for which they would be reimbursed and thus assisted in paying their university fees. I think that is a great idea, as long as you are not exploiting the students and it is honest pay for honest work and they are free to choose or reject it.
Senator Perrault: Is there full equality between male and female students now in this system?
Mr. Cameron: Overall numbers show women are in the majority and in some areas a dramatic change, such as law and medicine. There are still areas, the sciences generally and engineering particularly, where there are hardly any women at all.
Senator Perrault: I am in complete agreement with your views regarding visa students. They are very valuable. You say, however, in this brief: "There are frequent problems with the federal authorities for overseas students seeking visas to study in Canada." At least, on the face of it, the federal government supports this measure, but there are some problems. Would you cite some of those problems, impediments that should be removed?
Mr. Cameron: It is mostly the speed with which visas are issued. A student applies to a university, gets accepted, and then cannot get into Canada until two months after the program starts.
Senator Perrault: Speed up the process. That is the main problem.
Mr. Cameron: Yes.
Senator Perrault: The Australia system is no tuition fees, all loans. Is that feasible in today's Canada?
Mr. Cameron: One has to take it in the context in which it was introduced. Traditionally, Australia had no fees at all. They introduced fees at the same time as they introduced the income contingent repayment scheme, and it was done very specifically to increase enrolment in Australia, to increase very substantially the proportion of students going to university.
Their targets still fall well below what we have already achieved in terms of accessibility, so they were moving from way behind Canada's experience to something closer to it. We are already there. Adopting the same measures as Australia would not have the same consequences.
Senator Perrault: Neither feasible, nor desirable?
Mr. Cameron: We would have to rposte our fees by about 30 per cent to reach back to the level that Australia climbed to in their policy.
Senator Forest: Our researcher, who had more time to look into the budget, gave me this information. For the record, with respect to the two programs for relief following graduation with a Canada Student Loan: For the first six months, the students are not required to make any payments on their loans while they search for employment, but interest on the loan accumulates during that first six months and is usually part of the payment in the seventh month.
After the six months, if the student is unemployed or under-employed, they may apply for interest relief for up to 18 months over the next five years. If a student worked for a year and then was out of work, they could still apply for interest relief. This is the part of the program that has been extended to 30 months. While they may not have to pay interest for 36 consecutive months, the federal government covers the interest for 30 months, not the 36 months.
Mr. Cameron: That was my understanding but I did not have the temerity to contradict a senator.
Senator Forest: Oh, you should have. That is what witnesses are for.
Senator DeWare: I would like to commend you on your brief. I was a member of the commission 11 years ago, so it has been in place for a long time.
I am interested in recommendation 16 on research. We had the professors of the universities before our committee a few weeks ago. Their major complaint was that their research funds had been diminished to the point that they found it very difficult to hire or encourage young students with PhDs. Because the funds are not there, students are leaving. We call it our brain drain. They are applying to the United States and overseas and so on.
They also told us that professors doing research also have to teach, that the class load has increased to the point where it has taken away from their research and they have to prepare for their teaching more. The whole system of research across Canada has slowed down to almost a halt.
They said that they need 1.4 per cent of the GNP as a base in Canada, even though that figure is lower than some other countries which have two per cent or more. Recommendation number 16 would help keep our young people in Canada. It would encourage them and help them get started. I think that is an excellent recommendation.
What can we do about the young students entering their first year of university? The banks gave us a percentage -- I do not know if any of our committee remembers it, but we could find it. They found that after the first two years, students were dropping out with a debt load of around $6,000 because they were concerned that they could not afford to continue. What could we do to enhance the advancement of such students?
You have said that we are on the edge where we may start to lose students, that enrolments may decrease. What could we do to help those entry students for the first two years?
Mr. Cameron: The panel in Ontario was also concerned about this phenomenon. One of the recommendations we made, which the Ontario government has accepted at least partially, is that a portion of tuition increases, if they are to continue to increase, be set aside as an endowment for student assistance within the institution.
It seems to me it is in the federal government's interest to create opportunities, such as those we referred to in the budget already, for loan relief or loan deferral and so on, so that if students have to borrow, at least they can get the full degree out of their efforts and not be forced to drop out midway through. That is a phenomenon of which we are aware.
What we do not know, and you can help us here, is how many of those students come back again. One of the things you could help us with is in the efforts of a lot of governments and institutions like ours to establish some national system of tracking students so we have some sense of interprovincial mobility, of drop-outs and returnees, whether it is through a social insurance number or a unique identifier of students. This would greatly help the national effort in research and policy analysis in this area.
Senator DeWare: Has your organization ever discussed the idea of a student passport?
Mr. Cameron: Yes. We are headed in that direction. The universities in the four Atlantic provinces, the Atlantic Association of Universities, is now proposing a scheme of complete credit towards degree of university classes taken anywhere, both within the Atlantic provinces and outside. Part of this will involve the establishment and maintenance of a version of EDUCATIONal passports so that you carry those credits with you. It will lead to, as proposed, a unique degree actually offered by the AAU as opposed to a free-standing institution.
Senator DeWare: It could be portable?
Mr. Cameron: Absolutely portable. You could take a year at UBC and three courses at the University College of Cape Breton and add those to UNB and end up with a degree from the AAU.
[Translation]
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Do you speak French, Mr. Godbout?
Mr. Godbout: Yes.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Yesterday, when the budget was presented some were expecting to see an increase in transfer payments for EDUCATION and health care. However, let us confine ourselves to the topic of EDUCATION. Perhaps you will not be able to answer my question right now, but I would appreciate an answer at a later date. In the past five or six years, we have witnessed cuts to post-secondary and university EDUCATION. Could you provide us with a table showing the austerity measures that the provinces have taken? I am talking about the measures taken by the Maritime provinces. Everyone is trying to cut expenses and so forth. To what extent are these austerity measures the result of cuts to provincial university transfer payments. Do you have any figures you could give us?
Mr. Godbout: It is rather difficult to answer your question directly, but there is some indication in the report of the scope of the cuts to federal transfer payments and of the areas where the provinces have had to make cut-backs. Moreover, we note on page 6 of the English version that from 1983 to 1984, federal transfer payments for Post-Secondary education increased by $25 million. Provincial payments to universities increased by $119 million. I think that this is an indication of the efforts and measures taken at both the federal and provincial levels. The provinces could have done more if the level of transfer payments had been increased. If federal transfers to the provinces had --
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Some payments were in fact rposted.
Mr. Godbout: Only those for Post-Secondary education.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Overall federal transfer payments for EDUCATION decreased and that is what caused the problem. Provinces downloaded the problem on to institutions. This fact was mentioned to us on numerous occasions. We were hoping that in yesterday's budget, some adjustments would be made to resolve part of the problem. It would take a great deal of money to resolve all of the problems.
I also note here that you have a nice title and that you represent the universities. There are at least two francophone universities in the maritimes, the University of Moncton and Sainte-Anne in Nova Scotia. Are there any others?
Mr. Godbout: No.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Are these universities experiencing any particular problems? No one ever talks about them.
Mr. Godbout: I believe they do have some problems. The University of Moncton, for example, mentioned student debt loads. The university is also somewhat concerned about declining student enrolment. I believe that at this point in time, this is their primary concern. They are trying to take steps to bolster enrolment.
With respect to student mobility, the initiative announced by the province of Quebec may have an impact of the University of Moncton, a positive impact, depending on the costs. The students will be the ones to decide. However, perhaps certain francophones in New Brunswick will stay in New Brunswick, as will certain Nova Scotia francophones, in spite of the fact that tuition fees at the University of Moncton are still fairly high. However, I do think that universities are concerned about the drop in the number of francophone students and in overall student enrollment levels.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Is the decrease in the francophone student population mainly due to the fact that these students go to Quebec or is it simply a question of declining enrolment?
Mr. Godbout: I think it is primarily a question of indebtedness. However, the commission's study should supply us with information about the causes of this phenomenon. However, I believe that indebtedness is the principal cause.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Because no one --
[English]
The Chairman: We will get that all solved later on. We want to thank you very much for your excellent presentation. If any of your senator friends have any questions, we can direct them to you later. Hopefully, we will get some answers back. If you have any concerns you did not get to express on this date, particularly after you have had further opportunity to look into the budget, please feel free to contact us as well.
Honourable senators, we now have Dr. Jacqueline Thayer-Scott, the Chairperson of the National EDUCATION Organization Committee.
Dr. Thayer-Scott, please proceed.
Ms Jacqueline Thayer-Scott, Chairperson, National EDUCATION Organizations Committee: I was enjoying the previous discussion very much, as my day job is president of an institution which serves an area where more than half of the households have incomes under the national poverty line and the average graduating student debt load is $16,000. I have never in five years seen a poster for a student break in Florida. I was greatly interested in the conversation on student aid.
My role here today is to talk with you as Chair of the National EDUCATION Organizations Committee. I realize we are not exactly a household word so maybe I can tell you a little bit about who we are. We are really a national coalition of EDUCATION and training associations that came together about five or six years ago to work in common on labour force development issues. We have worked on these issues with other labour market partners at the Canadian Labour Force Development Board and also in our own right.
The names of many of our members you will see are very familiar. There is the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, which association I represent on the group, the Canadian Association of School Administrators, the Canadian Association for University Continuing EDUCATION, the Canadian Coalition of Community-based Trainers, the Canadian School Boards Association, the Canadian Teachers' Federation and the National Association of Career Colleges. In other words, it covers the gamut of public and private national EDUCATION and training associations from K to grade 12 through post-secondary and various forms of adult EDUCATION.
We were the first entity under which all of those associations sat down around the same table. A few others have come and gone over the last five years, and we are back to being the only place where all of those associations sit down around the table. We also have a couple of advocacy-related members of NEOC: the Canadian Association for Prior Learning Assessment, a relatively new association, the Canadian Association for Adult EDUCATION, which has a long and distinguished history of advocacy for adults, and the Movement for Canadian Literacy. The Canadian EDUCATION Association is an observer organization on our group because we are very much a policy-making group.
As you might imagine, one of the things that is involved in preparing any kind of position for a group such as yourselves is that each of those associations or members has to sign off on the position that is presented. While you will hear separately from many of our members on some of the issues that are before you, what I am presenting here is a consensus document related to a variety of issues on which all members of the national EDUCATION and training sector agree.
I will briefly go through our brief, first of all, emphasizing some of those items on which the National EDUCATION and Training Community has reviewed documents previously put out by this committee and has expressed some agreement with the views that were set out in those documents.
If you have a copy of the brief, on page 2 we set out a number of those things on which we agree, in particular, the sense that Post-Secondary education is facing a crisis in Canada. "Crisis" is, of course, a strong word and one has to avoid the dangers of hyperbole. However, if one looks at the overall tremendous demographic, economic and social trends that are pressing in on our higher EDUCATION industry and Post-Secondary education generally, then we think that it can truly be said to be facing a crisis. Some of these items will come about in the course of our discussion.
We also feel strongly that there is a logical federal role in post-secondary EDUCATION because, for example, this level of EDUCATION prepares youth and older students as well for the labour market and for citizenship, both of which are federal concerns.
We also agree that there should be some national principles for post-secondary EDUCATION. In our discussions, we have set out some of those principles that we think are common in the EDUCATION training sector and that all of our member associations can support. These are: Post-Secondary education should be affordable and accessible; students should be assured mobility from province to province; the post-secondary system should be comprehensive in nature so that Canadians can be postated in their own country; similar and equivalent courses should be transferable or portable between institutions across Canada; should include a broad choice of fields of study; Post-Secondary education should offer cross-disciplinary programs and opportunities for applied study and work place experience; some Post-Secondary education should be publicly funded; much Post-Secondary education should be publicly monitored through non-profit or "arms-length" Crown entities.
Those are actually fairly broad principles, and you may want to discuss those further at the end of this presentation.
Another area where we have expressed some agreement with documents previously published by the committee is that the practical relationship between EDUCATION and work must be reviewed. EDUCATION and training has been, and continues to be, a principal means of achieving and maintaining an innovative and productive society and economy. Our members, because of their concern about labour force development issues in this particular coalition, are strongly supportive of exploring further the nature of proper transitions to work experiences, particularly between EDUCATION and the work place, and trying to improve that relationship for Canadian students.
We believe that there is a strong role for both business and other community organizations in Post-Secondary education that needs to be explored and articulated. While that role may not be one of principal financial support, it very much must be one that is involved with planning processes, with offering work place EDUCATION opportunities to students and with assisting public and private educators to monitor and evaluate their programs.
Of the very large number of issues that have been identified by individual senators, some we believe are much more important than others. For NEOC members, pressing issues include developing means by which we can understand and expand the applications of information technology to post-secondary EDUCATION to facilitate the exchange of information in greater collaboration within this sector and to address the changing nature of the teaching profession. This next one is extremely important: to be able to market and export Canada's Post-Secondary education goods and services. I would like to come back to that one in our discussion, if I might. Other pressing issues include: to capitalize on the diversity and strengths of all post-secondary EDUCATION providers in Canada, both public and private, and to make a direct and unique contribution to national unity through the development of dialogue and shared values.
Many of these issues have been recently explored in a report that is referred to a bit later on. Originally, we were scheduled to present this brief at an earlier date and important business for the committee involved the postponement of your hearings on this. Therefore, a report that is referred to later on in our brief was published a week or two ago, which was a year-long study of the EDUCATION and training sector in Canada with respect to ways in which it can better meet some of the economic challenges that are facing it.
If you would like, Mr. Chairman, we can make arrangements through your office staff for senators to receive copies of that report.
The Chairman: Please do.
Ms Thayer-Scott: There are, as you might imagine, some views that have been expressed by members of the committee or in committee documents with which we do not necessarily agree. For example, we do not believe, on the whole, that there are serious problems with accessibility, in the narrow definition of that word, flexibility and accountability within the Post-Secondary education sector. We recognize that there are some problems but we think that sometimes the analysis is not as complete as it might be. The implication seems to be that the perceived problems are created and perpetuated by the system itself, but we need to emphasize that we have had other partners in this.
To a very large extent, Post-Secondary education in this country has had quite a close relationship to government, whether that be provincial, federal, or other varieties, over various periods. Many of the problems we feel that we experience in terms of making this sector more internationally and domestically competitive indeed relate to overly rigid governmental regulations, to rigid funding specifications, to government interference in collective bargaining processes and to dated policies that disallow modifications to accessibility and flexibility and fail to adequately define an accountability framework.
We note that often private EDUCATION and training organizations are cited as being more accessible and more accountable. Those of us in the public sector who have had experience with labour force development issues would agree that that is so because, indeed, they do not suffer from the same kinds of market regulation that governments have inflicted on the public sector. While we do not claim that the public post-secondary sector is free of any blame in this regard, we say that the interests of the two sectors have been so intertwined over the years that it is difficult to isolate which problems are systemic and which have indeed been caused by governmental interference and regulation over the years. We think that that is an extremely important analytical framework from which to view reform.
Another area where we may not agree with all of the opinions that have been provided is that many of our members do not agree that Post-Secondary education institutions must become more creative in solving their financial problems. As indicated in some of your discussion before, particularly in the analysis of the economy by Senator Andreychuk, it is very difficult if you live in an area where there is no significant business infrastructure and no Canadian business infrastructure to develop alternative and corporate sources of funding, for example.
Creativity can be one solution. Certainly, it is one that we would encourage in all of our members. However, there are some unanswered questions that are raised about the very public nature of civil institutions, about the impact on the collective agreements within those institutions, and the third-party involvement of government in collective bargaining in the sector and the skills and resources required within institutions to be creative. We would maintain that Post-Secondary education is a civic enterprise.
We do not think that creativity should be confused with responsibility. Responsibility for the financial problems and for solving the financial problems should not be thrown into the lap of the Post-Secondary education system alone. That is not to say that creativity is unnecessary, but public institutions are very largely the creatures of the public policies which created them and financed them. As well, access to private and corporate philanthropy is very unevenly distributed between metropolitan institutions and those in smaller centres in rural and remote areas.
We also do not entirely agree that a national Post-Secondary education strategy is necessary and sufficient. We believe it is highly tied to the development of national, social and industrial policy goals. Indeed, the development of a national PSE strategy in the absence of those has the potential to worsen rather than lessen the current crisis.
Most important, members of NEOC do not agree that the quality of higher EDUCATION is declining. Many services may be declining in volume but whether "quality" is declining has not been studied or determined. Indeed, quality has not been defined in policy, so it cannot have been measured. Quality, it may be assumed, arises from the successful achievement of agreed upon goals. However, as noted by members of the Senate, the goals of Post-Secondary education have not been defined in public policy. We would suggest that the statement of goals must come first. Then the quality of Post-Secondary education can be measured and determined.
We would add just a few other additional areas for conversation, many of which may have been raised in other presentations to you.
The issue of the various trends that are impacting on Canada's EDUCATION and training systems are incredibly important, and in the report that we will be distributing to you that we recently published, we think there is an excellent discussion of the ramifications of some of those trends.
Very briefly, you will be very much aware that there are fewer jobs in many industries, predominantly manufacturing and resource-based industries. There are new and different jobs in technologically-based and knowledge-based industries, particularly software and electronics.
There is a need for different forms of work and for recognizing different forms of work: volunteer work, international and global work, and so on. We have fewer younger people entering the workforce, very much an ageing Canadian workforce, more women, a strong percentage of aboriginal youth in the workforce and members of the visible minority communities. All of these things represent very distinctive challenges and pressures for the long-term survival of Canada's EDUCATION and training sector.
We also think that there is a need for governments to recognize that it is no longer possible to control this sector in policy terms in the way that it once was controlled. For example, there are still provinces where, from time to time, you hear ministers say that they will not allow certain kinds of EDUCATIONal institutions to operate in their province. Most of those kinds of EDUCATIONal institutions are already operating there via the Internet, and they cannot stop them.
As NAFTA comes into play with some new regulations that come off this year, the competitive pressure on our post-secondary system will increase. Yet there has been, according to our survey, no analysis by any government or academic group with respect to the implications of NAFTA or the internal trade agreement on the EDUCATION and training system. This system has a workforce of more than a million full-time employees in Canada. We think that might be a bit of a policy oversight and we are strongly encouraging in other venues that kind of analysis to be undertaken.
In short, senators, there are many challenges facing us. One of those is to develop export markets for many of our post-secondary products. We simply do not have demographically enough clients to retain the infrastructure that we currently have. As the NAFTA agreement kicks in more and more, many of the larger EDUCATION and training institutions in the U.S., both private and public, have the capacity to serve many Canadian needs on a marginal basis. If it is important for us to retain a strong and healthy EDUCATIONal system for the adult and post-secondary level, then there are a number of things that are required to improve the prospects for competitiveness and long-term sustainability of that sector.
Mr. Chairman, I will stop there. There are a few more pages with respect to the brief but I know the committee is running a bit behind and I want to leave as much opportunity as possible for questions and discussion.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: At page two of your brief, it is stated: "There is a logical federal role in Post-Secondary education because, for example, PSE prepares youth for the labour market and citizenship, and both are federal concerns." I am not sure if I agree with you. The responsibility that the federal government is taking right now towards Post-Secondary education is in relation to research and development. It is in relation to aboriginal needs because of the particular responsibility of the federal government in that area, and also in relation to student financing through student loans, and so on. If we would go along with this reasoning, they should also be involved at primary and secondary levels because we have seen that most students get in the labour market after their secondary studies. It is not the majority of them that go to university, so the same reasoning would apply there.
Second, with regard to citizenship, we should start developing a feeling for citizenship at the primary level and not wait for university. Anyhow, if those are your only two justifications, I do not agree completely.
At the end of the brief, you ask some questions that you sort of slipped through. At page 9, there are a large number of unanswered questions and issues for debate. You raise those questions regarding national E/T standards or principles: "Who wants national standards and why? Who doesn't? Who should be setting national E/T or PSE standards?"
If we are to make recommendations, we should make recommendations that do not further divide people but bring them closer. I would like you to elaborate on these questions of defining or developing a national standard and who would do it, and of the national standard of EDUCATION in a sense being commanded by the whole environment, including the United States.
Ms Thayer-Scott: If I might return to your first point. I think you would find that most of our membership would indeed say that there is a wider national role for EDUCATION generally. They would agree with your assumption that some of those things do begin to be developed at primary and secondary levels. We are, as you know, one of the few OECD countries that does not have a national office of EDUCATION. Now, why does that cause us a problem?
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Why we do not have one is the first question to answer.
Ms Thayer-Scott: The constitutional arrangements that we have in the country have always been problematic with respect to this issue.
Let me give you an example of the kind of problem that we often deal with as an association. We work closely with the new sectoral councils that have been developed by a large number of Canadian industries, where management and labour work together to develop human resource policies and address those needs. In fact, the study that we just completed that I referred to was undertaken as a result of listening for three or four years to those organizations.
Other employers tell us their biggest frustration is in dealing with such a highly fragmented EDUCATION and training system. If you have plants in Ontario, B.C. and New Brunswick, you have to deal with three separate provincial jurisdictions that have different ways of how they organize and implement various kinds of training regimes. You have cross-jurisdictional issues between governments, between institutions, and with the further devolution.
At our last meeting, the Software Human Resources Council, which sees some real national urgency in terms of addressing some of their needs, came to us and expressed extreme frustration. They said it used to be that they could go to HRDC and, after six or eight months of negotiation, get something worked out with some brokers to do something on a national basis. Now they have to go to ten different jurisdictions which deal with several different kinds of systems. It is extremely frustrating. It is, quite frankly, easier for them to deal increasingly with suppliers out of the U.S. because they do not have to deal with the kinds of jurisdictional hassles that Canadian EDUCATIONal and training institutions have to deal with. That is a real issue and one about which those of us who are involved in labour force development feel quite emphatic.
We recognize that our opinion is not going to count in changing the national constitutional arrangements, which is why we have looked more vigorously at what we can do within the sector to go around government, to go around those barriers, because Canada simply cannot afford them.
That does lead quite naturally into your second question on the issue of national EDUCATION training standards or principles and who wants those national standards and why? I think most consumers of EDUCATION and training want them, whether those are business or industry or whether those are parents who are concerned that their sons and daughters who get postated in one province can get jobs in another province.
There is increasingly more will within the EDUCATION and training sector to work on those issues. Indeed, you may be familiar with the training standards document that was published about a year ago by the Canadian Labour Force Development Board. NEOC and all of our members were active participants in developing those training standards, just as we were in developing the recently issued prior learning assessment and recognition standards.
We would like to see those kinds of national standards voluntarily adopted. Again, from time to time, that gets in the way of provinces who want to put their personal stamp on something by changing line 3 in subparagraph 32, but within the sector, there is increasingly more willingness to address those issues because our consumers are telling us that is what they want.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: In terms of EDUCATION, I am all for that, if industry wants to get together with the provinces and make plans for everything that you have described. However, EDUCATION is a most sensitive area. The system we have was not put together just on a constitutional caprice or whim. It is so much related to culture. That is why it is a thing that you have to approach very carefully.
Ms Thayer-Scott: I appreciate what you are saying. It is an extremely sensitive issue. All I am saying is there are some strong differences of opinion across the country on the subject. While it is not our role to hold particular opinions about that, we deal with the impact of it, which is angry consumers and customers who do not understand why it is so hard to do business in Canada.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: I think we could find other ways of solving these problems.
Ms Thayer-Scott: There are many of us who are putting a lot of hours into that process. I would agree.
Senator Perrault: This is a very useful paper. The subjects you have touched upon are of great interest to us. You talk in terms of private sector cooperation on page 9. You suggest that there are opportunities, as well as dangers. What kind of dangers do you perceive?
We talked to one college in Western Canada. Two banks have come in to provide them with their computer facilities. One is at the north end of the building. The other computer is at the south end of the building. The only thing they ask is a brief commercial every morning as the machines are fired up for a day's work. One is the Royal Bank and the other is CIBC. Now, the banks are certainly in a position to make donations of this kind. They have rather healthy bank statements these days. No one would be holding a tag day for them.
The cooperative program has been very successful in many instances. Could you delineate the areas where you say there could be hazards or dangers?
Ms Thayer-Scott: There are probably two areas where it can be difficult. The sensitivity in our membership would be around the age at which students get exposed to that kind of proprietary advocacy. Most educators and trainers would say, "At the post-secondary level, no problem. Those students are adults, very close to it." At the secondary level you begin to get a little bit more disagreement among educators and trainers, some believing that it is a natural part of the transition to the workplace experience and so on. You would get universal agreement at the elementary level that it should not occur. The judgmental qualities are not developed yet in terms of discrimination among different kinds of messages and differentiation.
While there is still a role for business to be involved with elementary EDUCATION, we believe there has to be some strong criteria and standards applied when that happens.
Senator Perrault: With the new technology, a number of school boards are signing up to have these companies provide programming for the students in exchange for commercials. Do you oppose that idea, generally?
Ms Thayer-Scott: Yes, generally, in the sense that there has not been a lot of thought given yet, across the board, to protocols and a code of ethics in doing this. You are dealing with quite young students.
Senator Perrault: They are trying to make consumers of these youngsters, obviously, for various products, are they not?
Ms Thayer-Scott: That is right. I think the key thing there is some kind of monitoring role. Increasingly, we see the need for that kind of monitoring role with public broadcasting. I think some of the same dangers are present in the minds of both parents and educators with respect to that kind of intrusion into the classroom at a young age.
Senator Perrault: Have you developed any detailed policy with respect to this matter across the country?
Ms Thayer-Scott: Not much has been done yet. Interest is rising in terms of doing that. I think it would take very little stimulus for that to begin to happen.
Senator Perrault: It might be of value.
Ms Thayer-Scott: Yes.
Senator Perrault: We have a free trade deal with the United States and Mexico now. We continue to be placed in the position of coping with internal barriers to free trade. We have a lot of internal barriers to the transfer of university credits, too.
Ms Thayer-Scott: Not if you come to the University College of Cape Breton. I am putting on my proprietary hat.
Senator Perrault: Is it not a problem in our Canadian institutions to have one university saying, "Well, your credits from this university are no good here. You will have to take the course over again"? We help families relocate throughout Canada. The first thing they find out is that their youngsters' courses have to be repeated in some cases because we refuse to accept one jurisdiction's EDUCATIONal levels in another jurisdiction. Do you think that is a serious problem?
Ms Thayer-Scott: It is still a serious problem but there are a number of initiatives being undertaken to address it. Certainly, in many jurisdictions now, including the one that you are currently sitting in, we have an agreement among the universities to accept first and second year credits.
Senator Perrault: That is good progress.
Ms Thayer-Scott: The harder transition is, quite frankly, still college-to-college and college-to-university. I would not pretend that all the problems have gone away at the university level but certainly a lot of initiatives are being undertaken to address them.
At the college level, there are issues within provinces, for example, community colleges within Ontario that do not recognize the programs of other community colleges, and that can be said in many jurisdictions.
Senator Perrault: This is what we have discovered. There is great sensitivity in those areas.
Ms Thayer-Scott: I think we are still a long way from solving the problems in terms of the articulation from college to university and back again. Increasingly, many students do that.
I mentioned a little while ago the Software Human Resource Council. They are an interesting case in point because they have begun working on the development of skill profiles that employers want in that particular industry. When, in a survey of their membership of employers, they asked them to describe the sort of perfect intern level professional, they said it is someone who has a university level BA followed by a one-year high tech college program. I can see why that combination would be very attractive to them, but it is not an easy combination for the student to achieve in a smooth way that allows them to move at minimal cost of time and money to do that.
Senator Perrault: A number of commentators, including journalists, those in the media, pointed out their belief that our standards are declining as a result of this money problem, that teaching standards are going down rather than up, the classes are too large, that this constitutes a crisis. What do you think with regard to the Atlantic provinces and the maritimes?
Ms Thayer-Scott: I think the Atlantic provinces and the maritimes, on the subject of class size, have an extremely good record. All the institutions here which have been heavily focused on undergraduate EDUCATION have really tried to make the small classroom experience a highlight of what they do.
As to the wider determination of what represents quality in post-secondary EDUCATION, I think one of the things that we tried to say in our brief, perhaps inadequately, is that we would inherently distrust most evaluative statements on the matter at this point because the issue of quality has never been defined. If we do not know what represents quality, how can we tell whether or not it has declined. We only have at this point some pretty inadequate and perhaps even ersatz markers or indicators, things like class size, but who is to say that somebody in a lecture class of 500 in Psychology 100 learns less than somebody in a lecture class of 50? The research has not been done.
Senator Perrault: So a blanket statement is not warranted under the circumstances?
Ms Thayer-Scott: No.
Senator Perrault: Finally, virtual university. I was at Simon Fraser University a few months ago. They unveiled, with great fanfare, their concept of the virtual university which will be going on the Internet and will be using satellite communications, I presume. What is the future of EDUCATION in view of this communications revolution?
Fifty-five million people now have access to the Internet. It may all disappear in some electronic black hole at some point because it really is becoming incredible, with 20 million people who have immediate access to machines. What function do you see this new technology playing in improving our EDUCATION standards, if any?
Ms Thayer-Scott: It is playing a dramatic function. That is one of the issues where we become very concerned about the export potential of Canadian institutions because we have been slower off the mark than some other jurisdictions to make the investments in that kind of technology. It is now awfully easy for a Canadian in Yarmouth or in Prince Albert to take a very specialized kind of Post-Secondary education program from an American university or from an Australian university, or from a university in the U.K.
Senator Perrault: Via the net or satellite or something.
Ms Thayer-Scott: That is right. I do not know how many of those programs would be available now. The last time a group that I was involved with tried to do an inventory was about eight or nine months ago. At that point there were 200 complete university degrees that you could do via the Internet.
Senator Perrault: There is nothing like personal contact in EDUCATION, is there?
Ms Thayer-Scott: Yes, that is true. I guess the other thing in terms of where the U.S. jurisdictions are going with this, you may have seen in the small print of the paper a week or two ago that the Western governors in the U.S. have just taken action to establish a Western Virtual University.
Senator Perrault: I have not seen that. I would like to access it on the Web and find out what it is about.
Ms Thayer-Scott: They are making a huge investment in doing this because of their belief that, to be economically successful, every citizen has to have access that is not time and place sensitive to upgrading their knowledge base.
I think that in a country that has fewer people, that has an ageing population, that is far more widely distributed in terms of place, that issue has to be a big concern for us as well. Again, we have not had the kinds of organizational structures and frameworks to move that ahead on a national agenda in the same kind of way that the U.S. Office of EDUCATION has played a role with the Western governors in the one that I just mentioned.
The personal touch issue is also an interesting one because, increasingly, many of those technologies are also incorporating that personal touch through one-to-one chat lines, through video conferencing, through occasionally bringing people together during the course of study. There are lots of way to do that.
Senator Perrault: There is interaction between the two.
Ms Thayer-Scott: That is right.
Senator Perrault: You may be interested in this. Before I left Vancouver, I was startled one morning as I was shaving to hear a broadcast on behalf of Queen's University. They said, "Get your Master of Business Administration degree from one of Canada's great universities, Queen's," and that they are establishing a couple of classrooms in Vancouver. It will involve a combination of the Internet and some live work in the lab. Obviously, Queen's has identified this as a possible revenue source and more power to them, but is that happening here as well? Is Queen's University offering courses in the maritimes?
Ms Thayer-Scott: Yes. Well, in terms of Queen's, not so much.
Senator Perrault: University of Toronto is doing some of it.
Ms Thayer-Scott: The market is not big enough to do that here but increasingly more MBA programs and specialist programs like that are being aggressively marketed in that way and, certainly, many maritime institutions are in the process of doing that.
Senator Perrault: I was startled to hear this on private radio. It was a highly intensive commercial, as well. It is a phenomenon. I have never seen it before. Does that represent unfair competition for the existent on-site universities?
Ms Thayer-Scott: It depends on who you ask. Where you stand is where you sit. Speaking personally, no, the more the merrier.
Senator Perrault: You have a good business school in Dalhousie and in other institutions.
Ms Thayer-Scott: We have several good business schools in the maritimes.
Senator Andreychuk: Building on what was said about exporting from province to province, I am a supporter of marketing and exporting our post-secondary EDUCATION system in order to be competitive with what others are already doing. However, we have heard from some senators and from some sectors a concern that we will be trampling on other cultures unfairly and that we should not be exporting our EDUCATION but rather building indigenous infrastructures in EDUCATION, that that would be our role. What do you say to that?
Ms Thayer-Scott: It is an interesting question because I would say it is not "either/or", that it is "both/and." I have to switch into my proprietary hat for a moment and speak as president of the University College of Cape Breton. We are a relatively small institution but we would not survive on the babies that Cape Bretoners and Nova Scotians are producing, so we have been very export-oriented. For example, this very week we have people in Kenya opening a sub-office of the University College of Cape Breton, and the Kenyan government has welcomed us, in fact, because we are Canadian, because we are not American or British. They do not see us as trampling on their culture. They see Canadians as having dealt with a diversity of culture issues on their own and having a distinctive posture that is welcoming and embracing of other cultures, relatively speaking, in the hierarchy of possible colonial powers who can help them out.
Here is a government that currently has to send 100,000 students overseas to get Post-Secondary education. Our commitment will be to work with them to develop their own structure as well as to market our institution. I think that we can be good Canadians and good corporate citizens and also survive economically, that the two are not mutually exclusive.
The Chairman: Dr. Thayer-Scott, we want to thank you for coming to another isle, to this part of Nova Scotia, and giving us your thoughts.
We have before us now two representatives from the Nova Scotia Confederation of University Faculty Associations. Please tell us who you are and what you represent. You have 15 or so minutes to do that and after that be prepared to answer some questions.
Mr. John D'Orsay, Executive Director, Nova Scotia Confederation of University Faculty Associations: I am John D'Orsay. I am the executive director of the Nova Scotia Confederation of University Faculty Associations, an organization representing the nine faculty associations in Nova Scotia. With me is Sonia Thon, who is the chair of our Relations With Government Committee and a faculty member at Acadia University. She will make an overview presentation.
Ms Sonia Thon, Chair, Relations With Government Committee, Nova Scotia Confederation of University Faculty Associations: We welcome the opportunity to make this presentation to the Subcommittee on Post-Secondary education. We want to particularly note that the Senate has charged you to inquire into the national, regional, provincial and local goals of the Post-Secondary education system. We have witnessed too many calls for government action and participated in too many deliberations which fail to establish what the goals were; a veritable epidemic of dysteleological myopia.
We concentrate now on the national goals. After half a century of substantial federal funding of Post-Secondary education, one struggles to find a statement of the goals the funding was to achieve. One can infer that the seaway, pipelines, airlines, highways and universities were each part of a nation-building strategy but the record is sufficiently scanty that in one account the federal intrusion was presented as a bit of constitutional mischief. Sadly, the evolutions of EPF and CHST have been away from linking to national goals. This has created and fostered an approach based on entitlement to transfers unrelated to outcomes achieved.
In contrast, the United States, as long as ago as 1947, set a goal of 35-per-cent participation rate in the cohort of students from 18 to 24 years of age, and in the 1980s Terrel Bell, Ronald Regan's Secretary of EDUCATION, headed a commission which called for a goal of 30 per cent of adults having attained a university degree. Over the past decade many American states and European countries have developed plans for 50 per cent or even 100-per-cent increases of enrolment. Through the 1980s the Nova Scotia government planned, and certainly budgeted, for stable or declining enrolment even in the face of continuing public demand, which resulted in a 60-per-cent enrolment increase. Our participation rate has reached 35 per cent and about 15 per cent of the labour force has attained a university degree. Now we would rank in the bottom five of the U.S. states.
The free trade agreement should have been accompanied by a commitment to close the gap in EDUCATIONal attainment between Canada and the United States. Just as the federal government led in forging that agreement, there should also have been federal leadership in levelling the EDUCATIONal playing field. The national goal should be to have 25 per cent of adults with university degrees. This should be accomplished by relating a portion of CHST funding to the increase in EDUCATIONal attainment in a province.
The changing composition of the labour force in the past decade demonstrates a transition to a more knowledge-based economy. Much of the economic growth of the past decade must be attributed to an increase in the level of EDUCATIONal attainment of the labour force. This should be further encouraged by adopting a knowledge-based economic development strategy. This would include phasing out incentives for raw material, capital intensive and financial accumulation models of development and directing the resources to knowledge-based programs to support research, EDUCATION and retraining. How can we allow tax dposttion for interest on money borrowed for equity investment without an equivalent treatment for those who use student loans for a human capital investment?
I come now to regional goals. In the maritime region there is a lengthy history of regional cooporation in Post-Secondary education through the Maritime Provinces Higher EDUCATION Commission. It has functioned to ensure financial flows to the provinces hosting students in regional programs, such as dentistry, medicine, pharmacy, forestry, veterinary medicine and others. The MPHEC has also put in place arrangements for students from the region to pursue studies elsewhere in the country in professional disciplines not offered in the region, disciplines such as optometry.
In the face of provinces concerned about out-of-province students taking subsidized places in their institutions, the kind of arrangements offered by MPHEC to ensure a reciprocal transfer of funds can permit specialization and differentiation of institutions. It may be that in some disciplines, such as dentistry, a broader regional catchment area would be appropriate.
The goals of regional bodies should be to ensure that students have access to a range of programs without generating concerns about the allocation of provincial subsidies. This should foster development of centres of specialization, although realistically the lack of language and regional studies programs suggests that the strategy has not been completely successful.
I will focus now on provincial goals. In our view, each province should establish goals to raise Post-Secondary educational attainment. Allocation of federal funds based on the province's success in raising EDUCATIONal attainment would foster this attitude. The provinces not only have a constitutional responsibility, but can pursue alternative and innovative approaches to attaining these goals. The small college approach followed in this region has advantages for differentiation of programs and competition based on quality.
A second concern for provinces ought to be ensuring equity of access through aid programs. The Canada Student Loan Program can be a backbone, but the financial and cultural obstacles to achieving university graduation need to be identified and addressed for a range of communities. The means to address the needs of Nova Scotia's Acadians differ from those of New Brunswick. The needs of black and native communities in Nova Scotia are different from those in Ontario. Weymouth Falls is not Windsor. A decade of drawing attention to the low participation rate in Nova Scotia's south and southwest shores suggests that the need to address the circumstances of these communities has not yet penetrated the consciousness of policy makers.
As for local goals, in our view the local level of Post-Secondary education is at the institution. We suggest two goals; one, enhancing quality through innovation, and two, ensuring diversity. In a province with institutions dedicated to pursuing access for women and Acadians, we do not suggest that equity is an institutional goal. In order to understand that you must reflect on Mount Saint Vincent University, which is mostly women, or Sainte-Anne, which is French.
I will now discuss the social, cultural, economic and political importance of PSE. As sponsors of "Beyond the Campus" -- this is a study that NSCUFA worked on and we have available here for your perusal -- we have said much about this topic. Let us ensure that the contribution of post-secondary EDUCATION to political participation, social change and cultural renewal is not lost in economic rposttionism.
Let us also recognize the economic realities: Universities generate considerable economic activity. The export earnings of Nova Scotia's universities rank them ahead of all other resource sectors except fisheries. The rate of return to government for its investment in this form of resource development exceeds the return to individuals. This point needs to be emphasized as a starting point in ongoing discussions of burdens and benefits of Post-Secondary education; for example, tuition versus operating grants as sources of funds. If our goal is to promote Post-Secondary educational attainment, then a further shift to subsidy will be required.
In economic terms, the continuing press of enrolment in the face of rising fees has much to do with the collapse of the job market for high school graduates, which has rposted opportunity costs. This I would like to have John D'Orsay explain to you after I finish my presentation.
How much should we count on a depressed labour market to fill a gap in government policy. How can the need for recurrent EDUCATION at the post-secondary level be supported in current aid and fee environments. This of course relates to the fact that there is not much income expected by students graduating from high school, since there are no job possibilities for them. Instead of going to work, they go to university. Therefore, there is not any more the opportunity to earn money. This opportunity then is lost, and one understands why there is such a high enrolment in the face of higher tuition fees and higher operating grants. This is the only thing people can do.
Responsiveness is my next topic in this presentation. NSCUFA has urged the adoption of responsive rather than block grant type funding mechanisms both between federal government and provinces, and provinces and universities. We have also argued against enrolment corridors and prescribed mandates for the province's institutions, because we believe that competition with predictable funding consequences will promote innovation, program development and enhanced quality.
Our experience over the last decade has been that government is much more obdurate than universities. For example, student aid programs are designed to meet the needs of 18 to 24-year-olds and savings assumptions exclude those seeking to come out of the labour force for recurrent EDUCATION. We have recently seen rollbacks to programs which encouraged those on social assistance to attend universities. Are unemployment recipients not channelled to short-term training rather than long-term EDUCATION? Why? So they can be laid off again when those skills become obsolete?
The student indebtedness issue takes us back to equity and rate of return issues. The most striking thing about Canada Student Loans is that 60 per cent of students do not have them. Many of those with loans graduate with debts that are quite modest. The result is that the burden of the indebtedness is focused on population with needs which were known and measured at the outset. The shift away from bursaries substantially increased the burden on this subset.
Just to clarify this, two-thirds of students need no loans, one-third of students need loans and they owe an average of $10,000, one-sixth of the students who need loans owe an average of $20,000, and this accounts for about 100,000 people who are in real trouble. Now identifying that sector of the population would be very useful in order to find a solution for it. It is not everybody but it is one-sixth of the student population.
Finally, the subcommittee's terms of reference have opened for discussion many areas in which NSCUFA has taken a keen interest. We would note a concern that they do not explicitly mention the joint product of university EDUCATION, basic and applied research. We hope that the Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology will be directing attention to this area. Strengthening the capacity of universities in both EDUCATION and research is essential to create a firm foundation for a knowledge-based economic development strategy.
Senator Perrault: I noticed on page 2 of the brief, and I really would appreciate very much if the witness would expand this answer;
This should be further encouraged by adopting a knowledge-based economic development strategy. This would include phasing out incentives for raw material, capital intensive and financial accumulation models of development and directing the resources to knowledge-based programs to support research, EDUCATION and retraining.
You want to phase out incentives for raw materials; would you explain exactly what that entails?
Mr. D'Orsay: We can identify a number of the things, and we have had some discussions in past years with the finance committee of the House of Commons about this issue. The basic idea is that things like the resource depletion allowance, the incentives for flow-through shares for mining and this type of thing that is targeted to creating resource-based development are a less-effective means of proceeding. If you intend to proceed strategically and use available government resources strategically, then you should focus those resources on the knowledge-based approaches in training, EDUCATION and research. That is not to say that the mining sector could not benefit from research moneys, for example, to develop environmental methods and this type of thing.
Similarly, the other example would be things like the dividend tax credit, which are founded in an idea that we need to give people a tax incentive to participate in equity investment, which idea may have been valid 30 or 40 years ago. It seems not to be as valid today. We are saying it is not as essential to Canada's economic development at this time to encourage the use of funds in that way as it is to channel funds into encouraging people to upgrade EDUCATION and training.
Senator Perrault: If these industries are successful that will generate tax revenue which could be diverted to assist EDUCATION.
Mr. D'Orsay: That is the question you face. In all those cases, you are investing public resources -- tax dollars in that sense -- in a program for economic development, and we are suggesting that the best investment is in knowledge-based forms of development.
Senator Perrault: There is always a contrary view on the subject.
Mr. D'Orsay: One example is the resource example to which I just referred. It would not be a bad thing to have the resource sector focusing efforts in the area of research and training of their workforce as a way of moving their industry forward.
Senator Perrault: You have another paragraph here that really requires amplification, I think.
The Free Trade Agreement should have been accompanied by a commitment to close the gap in EDUCATIONal attainment between Canada and the United States. Just as the federal government led in forging that agreement, there should also have been federal leadership in levelling the EDUCATIONal playing field
What do you mean by that? Some American colleges are not exemplary examples of higher EDUCATION.
Mr. D'Orsay: Yes, that is true. We are suggesting that a labour force which has 23 or 24 per cent of its participants with university degrees has an advantage over a labour force with 15 or 16 per cent and that we ought to be closing that gap.
Senator Perrault: So what you mean is more people attending universities?
Mr. D'Orsay: That would be the idea of raising EDUCATIONal attainment. Another area that is especially noticeable when comparing the two countries is the proportion of Americans who have finished high school versus, for example, in our region. We have a substantial deficit in that area as well. I appreciate your concern about the quality of the EDUCATION in some other jurisdictions, and that makes it a difficult issue to compare.
Senator Perrault: You have a pretty good system down here I think.
Mr. D'Orsay: Yes, and we are happy to retain that and advance it as a model.
You did ask for amplification. Indeed, at the time of the Free Trade Agreement, we prepared a ten-page document on the free trade era, setting out comparisons on funding, enrolment rates and graduation rates.
Senator Perrault: We will save it for the committee documentation. That is excellent.
Senator Forest: I noticed in the conclusion of your paper you say:
We would note a concern that they do not explicitly mention the joint product of university EDUCATION -- basic and applied research.
It may not have been explicitly mentioned but we have had quite a number of witnesses speak on that issue. We were pleased to see in the budget the establishment of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, which will help in the area of research. Again, it is a beginning, we hope, because we are very concerned about the effect that the lack of funding, both from the granting councils and from the various levels of government, has had upon research capabilities, particularly young researchers. Some previous witnesses recommended grants for the first three years of a young researcher's career.
Mr. D'Orsay: I am sure it is a matter of people trying to make your terms of reference manageable, because there are a number of areas that you could pursue on the research side. Certainly I have been impressed, at least in my contacts with members of Parliament and Paul Martin himself and their commitment to university research as demonstrated yesterday.
Senator Forest: I am sure all of the associations have been heard in this regard.
Mr. D'Orsay: We would like to claim that but we know we are not the only ones saying it. We understand there is substantial support in the business community as well for supporting basic research in the universities.
Senator Forest: If we had got our report out a little earlier we probably would have claimed it too.
Senator DeWare: On page 3 you talk about provincial goals. I would like you to explain the following:
The provinces not only have a constitutional responsibility but can pursue alternative and innovative approaches to attain these goals.
I would like to hear your recommendations on that proposal, or what you feel about it?
Mr. D'Orsay: One of them is the type of model that we have in this region for a number of institutions geographically disbursed. We have focused on creating geographical access and on the quality of undergraduate EDUCATION in those institutions. That model is somewhat different to what is available and what is being followed in some other provinces. That is one example.
Another area where you could have innovation is in the area of student aid programs. We really do not know what will work, and we ought to be encouraging provinces to intensify their efforts to create alternative ways and to try different things, and then follow what works to increase participation. As well, they could address questions perhaps about dealing with the segments of their populations that are disadvantaged in a homogeneous system to form programs for dealing with those groups -- in our case, for example, natives and Blacks.
Senator DeWare: Do you think we have come to the bottom of cuts in funding?
Mr. D'Orsay: It is possible that some provinces may think that further cuts are a spur to innovation. We do have four-year funding projections for our province that indicate that this is the last year of cuts. That is a commitment that we would like to see abided by. As well, the announcement yesterday on research indicates that there may be some motion on the other side in the federal government. We are hoping that the doors are opening and that we will be able to walk through with some of these arguments.
Senator DeWare: Do you think it would help if we had a minister of state for EDUCATION in Canada?
Mr. D'Orsay: I think our national organization has proposed something that is pretty much equivalent to that.
Senator DeWare: If we cannot have a minister of EDUCATION, a deputy minister.
Mr. D'Orsay: They have proposed the idea of a federal advisory body. Certainly the amount of federal support going to Post-Secondary education in particular is at the level that it warrants that kind of attention and that kind of focus.
Senator DeWare: All of our witnesses, especially students, are concerned about debt load and about the fact that institutions have been asked to cut for the past eight to ten years. If universities are to function properly, they need equipment and the facilities to keep up. The burden of these cuts has fallen to the students because as funding goes down, tuition goes up. There must be a cut-off somewhere.
Mr. D'Orsay: We made the point that tuition fees have not had the expected impact, that they are driving people away. I think you can argue that they have made the participation rate lower than it would otherwise be, given other economic factors, such as opportunities for employment. One side of the situation is that there is a window now. You must change if there are to be rposted levels of unemployment. There are problems in dealing with access to EDUCATION, and we need it; people need to have it.
On your other question about a minister of state for EDUCATION, we commented at some length on the question of constitutional responsibilities and how we really are in an era when it ought to be a joint federal-provincial matter, that there ought to be federal institutions in place to participate in Post-Secondary education deliberations. That is the model that is followed in other federal countries; Germany, Australia and the United States. We have canvassed that area again and have some specific proposals on that. We are happy to give you the benefits of all our past research.
[Translation]
Senator Losier-Cool: You refer on page 2 to a national goal. You state that your objective is to see that 25 per cent of the population graduates from university. I would be interested in hearing your views on national standards. Should national standards be introduced for university level students? Do you agree with this idea?
[English]
Mr. D'Orsay: Again, we have had occasion to think about that issue, and while I did not bring a paper on it, our basic approach is that we should be talking about access to accredited institutions that are indeed subject to national accreditation processes, and that would, in effect, create national standards. Again, that model is in place in other federal countries where you have federal support for Post-Secondary education.
Senator Losier-Cool: We have been asked to answer this question, and that is why we are looking for different answers from different people.
The Chairman: Do you have those thoughts in mind, such that you could put them in a paper and have a copy of that paper to us by the first of May?
Mr. D'Orsay: Yes, by the first of May, we can do that.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: In terms of professional achievement, we do have national norms because professions have established them.
Mr. D'Orsay: Yes, and we already have accrediting programs, as you indicate, in many of the professions -- engineering, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy. It is a matter of accrediting other programs.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: The accounting profession has national exams.
Mr. D'Orsay: That is right. Part of what the system has been built around up to now has been institutions and how well each institution has done with its exams; what percentage of accounting graduates are successful three years after passing the exam, what percentage of graduates in medicine, pharmacy, dentistry pass their exams. Certainly those things are tracked by people entering, for example, pharmacy programs. I do not think for a moment that you would want that type of mechanism for measuring other undergraduate degrees in general EDUCATION. I think you need a different type of accrediting mechanism there.
Senator Andreychuk: We have heard a lot about mobility and transferring credits from one province to another. Do you believe that it is the responsibility of either the federal or the provincial governments to establish portability and acceptance of credits, or do you believe that role is for the combined academic institutions of Canada?
Mr. D'Orsay: We are reasonably clear on the second line, that it should be the institutions who organize that area. We are very concerned when such proposals arise that we not get into thinking that a university degree is a collection of courses. We really must ground that concept in the bodies in the universities and ensure that when a program has been completed, you have a coherent body of knowledge as a result of your degree. Most of the mechanisms that we have seen coming from government initiatives have been against that.
Senator Andreychuk: Just as a postscript, when students complain, for example, that they have had so much trouble transferring from UBC to University of Toronto, do you think it is inherent in the system and not necessarily bad?
Mr. D'Orsay: At some levels we have difficulty imagining that moving from first year at UBC to University of Toronto will be a difficult transition. Showing up at University of Toronto with 19 credits in hand and wanting to take one course at U of T so you can call it a U of T degree, we can understand is a problem.
Senator Perrault: A number of the students who have come before us have said that they believe that standards have been declining as budget dollars have become scarcer. They say that in some cases of very large classes, there is almost no opportunity to meet with the professor, and interactivity is very much rposted. Some have also said that they would like to see a more effective way in which to judge the performance of the teachers, instructors and professors and that some of the members of the profession are very much opposed to this idea. I would be interested in your views on both those questions.
Mr. D'Orsay: We have spent time, yes, documenting declining standards with things like increases in student-staff ratios. There is a lot of evidence of that trend. On the other hand, we have evidence to demonstrate that in things like first-year English courses, where the objective should be communication skills and lots of written work, the number of written assignments to students has been rposted in the last decade from normally ten to somewhere in the range of six. The size of the class has gone from 50 to 35. We think those things are contrary to quality EDUCATION. We certainly have institutions that are consciously making larger classrooms in order to have larger classes and forcing people into the mode where they must have standardized testing. Those seem to us to be against the general objectives of improving communication skills and that type of thing.
I do not know if the committee is aware of it but I think there is quite a good report on this area prepared as an evaluation of University of Western Ontario and comparing it to some other institutions. Perhaps you can encourage the University of Western Ontario to give it to you. They had it done by external consultants and it includes comparisons between their way of delivering program and other ways of delivering program.
The second side of that situation is a little more encouraging, and it is the library side and access to the resources of libraries. The amount of resources, for example, the number of journals in libraries, have not been increasing at the rate they once did. Many of these collections have been eroded and are less useful to students.However, one of the things that librarians are able to say is that with CD-ROMS and the new technology, they are able to give students better access to the material they have and that, in fact, basic research skills that university undergraduate EDUCATION in particular tries to develop have been enhanced in the last decade.
Senator Perrault: Have they put much of this information on CD-ROMs?
Mr. D'Orsay: Yes, that is the type of thing they are doing, particularly in indexing and making that indexing process faster.
Senator Perrault: Is there reasonable cooperation among the universities and colleges in Canada with respect to library resources?
Mr. D'Orsay: Again, you should enquire of Nova Scotians in particular. We have a system here called Novanet that links I think all but one of our libraries and students in any one place. Go downstairs to the library here and you will be able to find out what books are available in any of the libraries in the province, except for one university, I think.
Ms Thon: The fact that you find where the book is located does not necessarily mean that the book is there.
Senator Perrault: It may have disappeared.
Ms Thon: Exactly. So we do have the technology but we still do not have the books, and we do not have easy access to the books. Students must rush to a library to try to find the one book that is available for a class of 40 to prepare an essay.
Senator Perrault: It could be out on loan or have disappeared from the face of this earth.
Mr. D'Orsay: The other part of it is that those research tools give people an increasing sense of frustration when viewing, for example, journal collections. You discover, not just the one or two in your field that your university has, but the 20 or 30 that you do not have. It increases people's demands.
I also want to spend a little bit of time on your evaluation question. One of the mysteries of universities is that you spend a lot of time evaluating the faculty, and certainly in this region we have a uniform practice of evaluating faculty teaching, either by student surveys or individual observation in the classroom. That is provided for in the collective agreements, which are the basis on which evaluations are done. The teaching dossiers being used in any universities show everybody what you are doing in the class, examples of the student work, some of your outlines, and a conscientious effort is made to compare those things. A lot of emphasis is placed on that individual level. However, there is a shortfall at the program level. That is, you can have a lot of well taught courses by faculty members who teach well and still not have a program that delivers what people want. There has not been that focus on overall levels of program and if what you are offering is coherent, is it up-to-date, is it what people need? That feeds back into this accreditation idea, that you can have more success having external reviews of programs to identify problems. We have been advocating that type of thing. I think that ought to be more of the level of the students concerned than the individual performer.
The other part of it is that if you put any individual in a bad environment they will not perform very well. Not everybody can lecture in a huge theatre, but maybe that is not the best way of teaching anyway and maybe you should not be doing it.
The Chairman: We now have, from the Regroupement des Universités de la francophonie hors Québec, Dr. Harley D'Entremont, rector of the Université Sainte-Anne.
[Translation]
Dr. Harley D'Entremont, Rector, Université Sainte-Anne: Thank you for your interest in Post-Secondary education in Canada. We have no doubt that the Senate is interested in this subject because of the importance it represents for our country's economic and social development. It goes without saying that university EDUCATION is extremely important for the country overall. It is even more important for members of a minority official language community, such as francophones outside Quebec.
The Regroupement des universités de la francophonie hors Québec brings together 12 universities working with francophone minority communities. These universities have decided to join forces to strengthen university EDUCATION, to work together on common priorities and to seek solutions to common problems.
While it speaks on behalf of universities in seven Canadian provinces, the Regroupement is not an inward-looking association. On the contrary, we are looking for every possible opportunity to build bridges and partnerships with organizations that can help us to move forward on those issues that we have identified.
My purpose in referring to the francophone communities outside Quebec is to remind you of the Canadian government's commitment in this area. Pursuant to the Official Languages Act, the federal government is required to provide services in both official languages. This legislation also commits the federal government as well as all of its departments and institutions to overseeing the development and growth of minority official language communities. The federal government has always recognized linguistic duality as an essential feature of the Canadian identity. Linguistic duality is a cornerstone of this country and there is evidence everywhere of its presence, in eastern Canada, in central Canada, in western Canada and in the North.
By enacting the Official Languages Act 27 or 28 years ago, Canada chose to move away from a territorial definition of linguistic duality. The act recognizes the existence of linguistic communities across Canada and the fact that they have rights. In fact, since 1988, Part VII of the act has also recognized the commitment on the part of the federal government and of its departments to promote the growth of francophone and anglophone minorities in Canada and to support their development.
In August of 1994, the federal government approved the establishment of a framework of responsibility for implementing sections 41 and 42 of Part VII of the Official Languages Act.
These new legislative provisions target key institutions working in the economic, cultural and human resources sectors. For the most part, the same federal institutions and departments are involved in lending assistance to post-secondary institutions. A series of measures is being proposed to help these institutions comply with the new requirements of the act. The Department of Canadian Heritage, which is responsible for the framework of responsibility, is identified as a key institution.
Francophone post-secondary institutions outside Quebec are in desperate need of further development. Clearly, the federal and provincial governments spend less money overall on these institutions than the demographic weight of these minority communities would suggest they spend. It is worrisome to note that this sector is underfunded and that some catching up is in order if we are to ensure that these communities have the opportunity to participate on an equal basis in the future of this country. This state of underdevelopment is due to several factors, including the low rate of participation in university studies, possibly because of the rural nature of these communities and the shortage of university institutions. Regardless of the reason, we are not here to judge the past or assign blame; we must acknowledge this inequity in the delivery of public services and the need to make up lost ground.
The Regroupement des universités de la francophonie hors Québec has no objections to a general review of social programs or to the various proposals put forward by other university associations such as the AUCC which call for a strong federal presence in the field of research. On the contrary, we concur with the demands of these organizations for changes to research and student aid programs. However, any reform in this area must take into account the need for minority official language communities outside Quebec to make up lost ground as well as the commitments and obligations of the Canadian government under the Official Languages Act, in particular sections 41 and 42 of Part VII of the legislation. Achieving this development will likely not happen through changes to established programs financing. I urge you to give this matter serious consideration and to propose acceptable measures so as not to further impede the development of these communities and universities. In a world increasingly dependant on knowledge and technology, it is critical that the universities which serve these communities continue to grow.
We are not asking for any kind of special treatment. We merely want to be treated equitably. Francophone universities outside Quebec have always been underfunded. The concept of equity, in particular vertical equity, suggests that special attention should be paid to the impact of the federal government's proposals on francophone universities outside Quebec to ensure that the vitality and growth of these French-speaking communities is not affected.
Francophone communities outside Quebec still do not benefit from the same university opportunities, -- whether it be a question of the overall participation in course programs, living the university experience in one's mother tongue, or the accessibility of study programs in French -- as anglophones in all other Canadian provinces, including Quebec.
There is still room to consolidate and enrich study programs, research activities and existing services in French in provinces other than Quebec. This is especially true of certain very specific initiatives such as the sharing of EDUCATIONal experiences and tools to increase the mastery of the French language, greater accessibility to certain programs such as administrative sciences, certain health care fields and so forth. Canada's francophone minorities would undoubtedly stand to benefit a great deal from these programs which would provide some measure of cultural security as well as a more stable base for their economic, social and community development.
The process of consolidating, enriching and enhancing accessibility to university programs in French for all francophone communities outside Quebec is important. If Canada is to continue to view linguistic duality as a core national value, it has a duty to invest in the training of francophone human resources from coast to coast and to make every effort to reverse a trend that has been observed. Since a survey of francophones between the ages of 15 and 24 was conducted in 1971, figures have shown that increasing numbers of students have transferred from French language programs to English programs.
Given the new information communication technologies, this exercise in consolidating, enriching and expanding programs is more of a possibility today than ever before, provided governments agree to make the required investments to establish an electronic network for francophone universities outside Quebec and take the time needed to develop a national EDUCATION plan based on cooperation among institutions.
With this objective in mind, the Regroupement has decided to acquire the necessary tools with which to pursue the following objectives:
Facilitate course exchanges between the various Regroupement institutions;
Facilitate access by francophone communities currently not served by a Regroupement member institution to university programs in French;
Facilitate the production and sharing of multimediated instructional material among university institutions and private companies;
Facilitate the development of joint initiatives to consolidate the standing that Regroupement institutions currently enjoy on the Canadian university scene and to promote the expansion of a knowledge-based community more attuned to the reality of francophone minorities and intercultural relations.
In support of these objectives, Regroupement institutions would like to put in place an effective cooperation and exchange mechanism. To be truly effective, this mechanism must allow for almost instantaneous exchanges, be relatively inexpensive to implement and use and be as user-friendly as possible for professors and the student body. All signs point to the establishment of a network using the latest information communication technologies such as telematic networks, audio networks and videoconferencing.
The Regroupement is convinced that the establishment of a national cooperation and exchange network for its institutions is vitally important, not only as a means of consolidating and enriching the present assets of Canada's francophone minorities, but also as a means of ensuring their survival and growth in the longer term and promoting a certain vision of the country. The establishment of such a network and the related instructional material could produce more concrete benefits for this country in terms of human resources development and expertise -- that could eventually be marketed abroad -- in the field of remote multimediated EDUCATION.
In short, to our mind, the establishment of this network is completely in keeping with the decision made by the federal cabinet during the summer of 1994 to pursue the goals and initiate the measures set out in sections 41 and 42 of the Official Languages Act as part of the process of interdepartmental coordination geared to three priority sectors: culture, the economy and human resources development. For this reason, the Regroupement hopes that the Department of Canadian Heritage with which it has been associated since its founding in 1990 will acquire the financial means to support the development of this network and also act as a mentor so that it can seek contributions from other departments in support of particular projects.
I wanted to go into the details of the proposed national network for francophone universities outside Quebec to illustrate how important this initiative is to us. Since our communities are scattered around the country and given the small size of many institutions, we need this type of network to maximize our potential and deliver the best possible services to our clients at a reasonable cost.
We hope that your committee will underscore in its report the urgent need felt by francophone universities outside Quebec. Francophones outside Quebec are entitled to receive a quality university EDUCATION so that they can fully participate in Canada's socio-economic development which increasingly is knowledge-based.
I would be happy to answer any questions in either English or French.
[English]
The Chairman: Did you ever think of the possibility, being a French university here in Atlantic Canada and given that yours is a Latin language, of teaching and expanding Spanish in light of free trade agreements with Mexico and South American countries so that a lot our young Canadians in this part of Canada might get jobs down there?
Mr. D'Entremont: If I can put on my hat as president of Université Sainte-Anne, I can assure you there are very few ideas we have not thought of in terms of what we can do. We actually have a professor who used to teach some courses in Spanish, but it was college classique. We even have a German professor but we have yet to teach German.
I think the point is well taken. Université Sainte-Anne and our member institutions have one thing in common, that our graduates, by and large, come out bilingual because you have access to both languages. Sainte-Anne attracts Québécois, in part because they want to learn another language. We agree that two languages, English and French, is only a start. I attended an international conference, and I remember sitting next to someone from Poland who could speak seven languages. I felt pretty stupid just speaking two. So two as a start I think is a good thing, and obviously Spanish and the North American Free Trade Agreement makes a lot of sense with all our universities.
Senator Andreychuk: I very much appreciate your approach to the difficulties that you face and I particularly underscore your comment that you are not looking for special treatment but fair treatment. In that context, to what extent do you believe that the area has been either ignored or not given sufficient attention? In this time of downsizing, are your problems exacerbated by that trend or were they there before?
Mr. D'Entremont: They were there before. On the question of equity, I do not have the figures with me but the FCFA, the francophone association in Ottawa, organized a round table that looked at community colleges and universities, and I sat on that round table for a long while. We did some comparisons, for example, of about a million francophones outside of Quebec -- slightly larger than the anglophone population in Quebec. We compared budgets, for example, to English universities in Quebec. When you compare, either on a pro rata or a per capita basis, English universities in Quebec for the same type population, it is interesting. For example, if la Francophonie hors Quebec had resources in the university sector comparable to the English population in Quebec for McGill and Bishop's, I think it amounted to something like 40 or 50 per cent more resources for la Francophonie hors Quebec. When we compared on a national basis, for example, money spent on average for the population, that spent for francophone EDUCATION outside of Quebec was substantially lower. Again, the comparison to Quebec is illustrative of an identical minority population complaining they are being mistreated. In terms of actual dollars, in the comparison of the English population in Quebec to the same size of population outside Quebec, even if you discounted the fact that McGill is a world-class university and everything else, you still came out with a lower per student or per capita operation outside of Quebec.
Senator Andreychuk: My question was is this something you were facing before the recent attention to cut-backs and have the cut-backs accelerated that problem?
Mr. D'Entremont: It has, but in the case of Sainte-Anne's, although we have been in existence for 109 years, only in the 1970s did we let go of the college classique model and begin to develop as a more modern university. The University of Moncton was founded in 1963, so it is of more recent vintage. We have history but we had less of a chance to fully develop before the downturn came. I would argue in the case of Atlantic Canada, for example, that Moncton was founded in 1963, and Saint-Anne in 1971, whereas other universities expanded during that period of expansion by universities. Some of our universities were only sort of getting started, so when the crunch came we were at a different level of development.
Yes, the problem was there before, but I would argue that it was probably aggravated because we did not have that base from which to build. For example, endowment funds in our universities are substantially lower than what they are in established, mainstream universities that were expanding and had a solid basis in the 1940s and 1950s, for example.
Senator Andreychuk: Certainly universities have a responsibility for community service. You have quite eloquently pointed out how universities outside of Quebec have provided the base and the core for communities. Do you feel, as I do from what I have seen at the University of Regina in particular, that without the attention paid to linguistics at the University of Regina, many of the spin-offs to the francophone community in Saskatchewan would not have been encouraged or supported, that that base at the university level is a core to the survival and existence of communities in many cases?
Mr. D'Entremont: In the absence of, let us say, governments being specifically dedicated to that sort of thing in our communities, in many cases universities -- and again, I can speak more in the case of Moncton where I taught for 13 years and Sainte-Anne where I am now president -- through the Institut linguistique and the Formation linguistique in Regina, controlled in large part by francophones, become one of the, if not the major contributors to the development of those communities. I think you will find that particularly in the east, in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. We have centres that deal with Sainte-Anne's for linguistic development and also pedagogical development. We have tried to do a lot, and we have a responsibility to do more because in many cases we may be the only university in the province dealing with the clientele. Compared to other universities that can be more elitist in terms of either admission requirements or programs, we must try to do a lot more, including working with the community, because we are one of the few institutions of any size that actually operates in French in Nova Scotia, although we are small. Still, in Nova Scotia's terms, Sainte-Anne is a very sizeable francophone institution for our community and, as such, in our absence, obviously the French community would not have developed as it has. Nevertheless, there are still problems. It obviously is a very big, important influence.
Senator Andreychuk: I have been reading recently about France, that so much of the technologies on the Internet are English based. Therefore, they feel that they are losing a competitive edge. Do you believe that Canada has fostered our bilingual edge? Have we furthered our technologies as part of our strategies when we go on global marketing expeditions, given that in some communities we have a francophone base to work with? If you had one recommendation to give to the federal government in that whole area of marketing our technologies from the francophone base in the universities, the research there, what would it be?
Mr. D'Entremont: Part of the question has to do with pushing the bilingual nature. I must admit that it was not a scientific survey, but at one point, I saw a survey about MBA programs in international commerce. I was appalled to see that, if my memory is correct, American international MBA programs are requiring more languages than Canadian international MBA programs, even those focused on international matters, which is a bit shocking. I think we may be losing part of our competitive edge by not pushing it as much in terms of requirements, for example, university graduation, in many cases. If you compare the Europeans, most postated Europeans speak a fair number of languages compared to other countries.
In terms of technology, I must say in terms of research in general it is interesting that a few years -- actually it was less to do with technology and more with the language of science -- there was a little problem with the Institut Pasteur in Paris. If memory serves me, it was universities and researchers in Quebec who actually pushed to reassert the inclusion of French in research or scientific documents at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. It was sort of disconcerting for us to see in France a certain sliding, I would say, towards accepting English as the language of science, although it seems lately that the French government is putting a lot more effort into re-establishing French as a language of science and of technology.
A lot of what is on the Internet -- I do not surf it that much, I do not have that much time -- is American driven and dominated, but that just means we must strive harder to ensure that there is a major francophone presence, and I think Canada has a very important role here because we are viewed as leaders in communication, so it seems to me that that might be an important point.
[Translation]
Senator Losier-Cool: Thank you for agreeing to share with the committee the special characteristics of francophone universities outside Quebec. My question concerns the alarm that has been sounded by all students thus far, whether in Ottawa, in the west or here yesterday, on the issue of student indebtedness. Given where our students live, they are fairly bilingual. When I was working in the secondary school system, I recall that students were solicited to some extent by English universities and I want to know if this is still the case. I know that UMB came to Bathurst to recruit good students, claiming in the process that it was less expensive to attend this university. Is this practice still prevalent in your institutions or is it the students who decide which institution they will attend, based on available funding?
My second question relates somewhat to what the Higher EDUCATION Commission said to us this morning about where students get their funding. Are Acadians, that is students at the University of Moncton, college students or for that matter all francophone students outside Quebec more indebted than others?
Mr. D'Entremont: This would appear to be the case, particularly if we look at our region, one that I can relate to. In many cases, university students come from rural communities where incomes are lower. Even though parents earn less money, tuition fees continue to be high. Therefore, I know for a fact that the percentage of maritime students who request financial assistance is higher in Moncton and in Sainte-Anne than it is on average elsewhere in the maritimes.
As for the recruitment carried out by anglophone universities, this is only partly due to financial considerations. This speaks to the need to develop our institutions. The University of Moncton in New Brunswick and Sainte-Anne in Nova Scotia are the only francophone universities in these provinces. If the choice of programs is too limited and if services are inadequate, students will tend to look elsewhere. Gone are the days when parents would send their children off to a classical college at the age of 12 and where the child had no choice in the matter. These days, young people have options and our institutions must be in a position to offer them not only quality services, but a broad spectrum of modern services and products which they and even older students have come to expect.
Therefore, money is not the only consideration. The university infrastructure outside Quebec needs to be developed. As I was saying earlier, this process had begun, then the crisis set in several years ago and the pace of development slowed. The economic crisis has not helped matters either. It is not easy to get our momentum going again, particularly in the case of the University of Moncton and Sainte-Anne where enrolment has declined in recent years. It will take a period of ten years to recover losses incurred over a two-year period. Based on our experience, making up any ground lost is a more difficult process.
Senator Losier-Cool: Are Acadian students concerned about the same funding and debt issues as students at Laurentian University in Sudbury?
M. D'Entremont: Yes. Earlier on, mention was made of a report that we could send to you. I will take note of your questions. There are far more detailed documents available in which the issues of indebtedness and participation rates are addressed. If a knowledge-based society is to develop, than so be it. If francophones outside Quebec cannot keep pace with this growth, as I mentioned earlier, this is where we will have problems. In the maritimes, for example, if growth in fishing regions, rural regions and resource-based industries stalls and if we do not push for the development of knowledge-based institutions, we are certain to encounter problems down the road. It does not take a scientific study to show that two plus two equals four.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: I just want to say how pleased I am to finally hear someone discussing university EDUCATION in French. This morning, I wanted to put a question to the group before yours which was speaking on behalf of all universities in the maritime provinces, but I was prevented from doing so. Therefore, I am pleased to be able to ask it now because the development of services and the like for Acadians has been a long-standing concern of mine.
I have a very specific question concerning the language training institute of the University of Regina. I have been told that this institute was heavily penalized when we moved from an APS system to a transfer payment system. I want to bring this matter to the attention of the Heritage Minister because apparently this comes under her jurisdiction. Instead of worrying about flags, perhaps she could be looking into this. Have you been affected by this shift in any way? All provinces did no react the same way to the cuts that were made. Some downloaded the burden of the cuts, while others absorbed them.
Mr. D'Entremont: I am not aware of the details involving the language training institute which, by the way, is an associate member of the Regroupement. They have not attained the required level of development, according to our constitution, to become a full-time member. I do know that Saint-Boniface encountered a serious problem with respect to official language programs. The institution expected to lose in the neighbourhood of $700,000 or $800,000 as a result of federal cuts. I would assume that Regina was facing the same situation. Clearly, federal cut-backs affect all equalization programs and transfer programs for EDUCATION. What hits hardest is the fact that official languages programs have also been cut. I referred earlier to other sources of financing. I know that most of our university institutions outside Quebec receive less funding through official language programs. I am not sure about the specifics in Regina, but I do know that Saint-Boniface experienced major problems last year which were ultimately resolved, but not before a battle between the university and the government.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: We do not want to get into a fight with anyone either. However, there is much boasting done about the progress that we have made in EDUCATION services to francophone minorities. By the way, it must be tempting to compare yourself with McGill or Concordia. However, we would have to spend a week together reviewing the history of the former. McGill has achieved a noteworthy level of development because it was the first university in Canada and it has quite a history. Acadians, on the other hand, have a very tragic history marked by all kinds of factors, not necessarily associated with the generosity of some or the pettiness of others. I am talking about the present situation.
Mr. D'Entremont: You are correct. I do believe, however, that Laval was the first university in North America, not McGill. In any event, there is no doubt that McGill is unique. We were merely trying to assess the situation in terms of demographic weight.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: When we look at the English CEGEPs in Quebec and then at francophone community colleges in the other provinces, the comparison no longer holds.
Mr. D'Entremont: We often hear the argument that on a per student basis, we are not penalized. Basically, it is the chicken and the egg issue. If enrolment is low, this is in part due to the lack of infrastructures, necessary resources and programs to attract students and to develop the university sector. We are told that once we have more students, then we will receive more money. However, when we look at the participation rate in terms of the demographic weight of francophones outside Quebec, how does this affect public funding of Post-Secondary education? Are funding levels reasonable given the demographic weight of our communities, notwithstanding comparisons with other institutions? We quickly come to the conclusion that they are not. You mentioned McGill University, but Dalhousie and other universities have much smaller endowment funds because they were not supported back in the late 19th and early 20th century. Therefore, they do not benefit from an additional one, two or three per cent in revenues from investments, for example. Often, this makes a major difference. When an institution has an additional two or three per cent to work with, it makes a great deal of difference in terms of scholarships and materials.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: I would like to get back to the subject of federal transfer payments. You mentioned that there was a problem in Saint-Boniface. We know that the language institute in Regina is also experiencing a problem and perhaps you are as well, albeit to a lesser extent. I do not want you to spend a month doing complicated research, but would it be possible for you to contact these institutions to ask if transfer payments have benefitted them or hindered them. It would be interesting and very useful to get this information, particularly if we want to draft a special chapter or include something in the report on francophone universities. I will try and hurry up, before I get scolded for taking up too much time. The Maritime Higher EDUCATION Commission was at least able to provide a partial answer before we were interrupted. They pointed out that enrolment seemed to have declined in francophone institutions. You stated that perhaps your situation would improve if you increased your staff levels. To what do you attribute this declining enrolment? I would also like to hear your views on one point. Do you believe that the proximity of Quebec to New Brunswick in particular and to a lesser extent to Nova Scotia is responsible for provincial governments saying: Well, we cannot provide a particular service, but if you go to Quebec, they will welcome you. This lets them off the hook. Did you get all of that?
Mr. D'Entremont: I can answer insofar as Moncton and Sainte-Anne are concerned, but perhaps less so for Moncton. These are rather two different cases, but we can make a number of observations. Cost is an issue. Our costs and expenses are increasing. There are fewer graduates coming out of secondary school. Therefore, enrolment is down because fewer students are graduating from secondary school. This is one explanation.
There is also the reason Senator Losier-Cool mentioned earlier, namely increased competition. Secondary school students today are more mobile. However, Quebec and even anglophone universities must contend with the same situation. Over the past 10 or 15 years, community colleges have grown significantly in New Brunswick. They now offer two or three-year high technology programs in French. They are no longer merely vocational schools. For a number of students, attending community college is their first choice, and rightly so. Some interesting study programs lead to interesting careers. Therefore, there are fewer students choosing to go to university and more competition.
In Sainte-Anne's case in particular, we must also contend with the impact of cost-cutting decisions which have affected the entire post-secondary sector. In Nova Scotia the number of bachelor of EDUCATION programs has been slashed from seven to four. Integrated programs, that is combined bachelor of arts and bachelor of EDUCATION programs, were also eliminated and these had been a drawing point for secondary school students. In the case of Sainte-Anne, the integrated program was our best seller. As I was saying, the number of such programs was cut from seven to four. Sainte-Anne did manage to win the battle and save the program. However, one integrated program was eliminated and the rule now is that we cannot give preferential treatment to our own students for admission to a bachelor of EDUCATION program, in order not to penalize Dalhousie University.
For most anglophone institutions, the rule that the bachelor of EDUCATION follows the bachelor of arts program was a good one. We do not give any preferential treatment to students on campus and moreover, the demand for this program is high. In Sainte-Anne's case in particular, we lost one of our best tools for recruiting students in secondary school, a tool which enabled us to bring them to the university for a four- or five-year program which included the bachelor of EDUCATION.
Moncton is not in the same situation. Perhaps this was a good decision insofar as universities and the province were concerned, but for us, because the bachelor of EDUCATION accounted for up to 60 per cent of the integrated program and for our enrolments, eliminating the possibility of recruiting students at the secondary level for a four- or five-year program which includes the bachelor of EDUCATION was a decision that affected us a great deal. We now need to review our other bachelor's programs and rethink our recruitment practices to conform to these changes in the EDUCATION program. This helps to explain why small minority institutions are more vulnerable. When a large institution with an enrolment of 10,000 students loses 200 or 100 students, the impact is marginal at best. However, in our case, a simple decision to do away with a four- or five-year program and introduce a policy banning preferential treatment adversely affects us. In our case, we do not even manage to meet our quotas because we do not have a large pool of francophone students from which to draw.
Therefore, even if we accepted secondary students into a bachelor's program and subsequently a bachelor of EDUCATION program, we would not be denying anyone an opportunity to attend university. These are just some of the possible reasons for declining enrolment. Sometimes, it is a matter of infrastructure, competition, money and the lack of students. Decisions taken by the majority, however well-intentioned, affect us.
Whether we are talking about our institutions or Saint-Boniface, the smaller we are, the more difficult it is for us to recover from adverse decisions. Officials at Saint-Anne are currently discussing how they will deal with this. We need a minimum level of support to maintain basic facilities and infrastructures so that we can use this as a springboard to further development.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: I am almost finished, Mr. Chairman. This is the first time that a full exchange with a witness has been in French. Can you tell me if the Acadian population of the Maritime provinces is declining or remaining steady?
Mr. D'Entremont: The population is declining somewhat in Nova Scotia. The rate of assimilation is also declining, however, and the situation is less serious than it was previously. However, if we compare the 1991 census to the 1981 version, we note that fewer people have identified themselves as Acadians. In New Brunswick, it varies from region to region, but the rate of assimilation is lower than in Nova Scotia. It is higher in areas such as Fredericton and Saint John and in the southeast portion of the province. There are many more francophones in the northeast and northwest. There are even many people by the name of Smith and Ferguson who are francophones, or assimilated anglophones.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: I am not talking about going back three years, but can you tell me whether anything has been written in the last year on the state of EDUCATION for francophones, whether it be francophones in the maritimes or francophones outside Quebec? I think we need more comprehensive data to get a better understanding of this issue. I would greatly appreciate any information that you could share with us.
Mr. D'Entremont: There is, of course, the report of the post-secondary consultation committee which is made up of young French Canadians and Acadian francophones. This report was published only two years ago. Furthermore, there is substantial data on budgets by sector. Even the endowment funds show that we are poorer. Perhaps this is obvious, but when there is less money in the bank, we have less revenue to invest. I could send you a copy of this report which includes figures.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Thank you very much. I could go on for some time asking you questions.
Mr. D'Entremont: In any case, I will be coming back this afternoon.
[English]
Senator Forest: I want to give a little bit of background for the record of Faculté Saint-Jean because I was on the council of the faculty and the board of governors of the University of Alberta when it was integrated as a result of the cooperation of the federal and provincial governments, the oblate fathers and the university. At the time there was great concern among the board of governors. It was a very close vote as to whether they should be integrated. Now, a number of years later, it is wonderful to see what has happened. I think some of the good news needs to be told.
It is integrated, we have small numbers but it has wonderful programs. We have quite a few students coming from Quebec and that is wonderful for participation both ways as far as the cultures are concerned. They have recently received federal grants which allowed them to update their facilities, and a quarter of Edmonton is called Cité francophone because we have book shops, we have a lot of things happening. So I think we must recognize that great progress has been made. We are always short of funds, we have small numbers, but I think that these kinds of programs across Canada are a tremendous asset not only to the francophones but to the anglophones. I also think that it is very important for the unity of our country that we have these organizations.
Sir, you sound pessimistic but there must be good stories here about what is happening, and I think we need to hear just a little bit about them. We are all short of funds but do you see a light at the end of the tunnel?
Mr. D'Entremont: First of all, in the fall, we had our annual meeting of the regroupement at the Faculté Saint-Jean. I saw what has been built and developed there, and you are right. I am rarely accused of being pessimistic, I am usually the person who while staring at a half-a-million-dollar deficit, will say, "Well, let us do some fund raising, we still have eight days to go before the year end". I am rarely ever accused of being pessimistic. However, you are right. For example, the federal initiative that gave money to the Faculté Saint-Jean, the Université Sainte-Anne and Moncton for their law school was very useful and interesting in that it was more targeted. If money is limited, it is a question of looking at what is more important. On the question of priorities, our argument is that if duality is a fundamental characteristic of this nation and there is a stage of underdevelopment with compared, say, to the past, it just might be that, within limited funds, this should be a priority area.
You are right in that, over the years, particularly the past few years, there has been a special initiative for gestien scolaire, or what they call school governance and Post-Secondary education, and they have put $34 million into post-secondary, including the Community College of Ontario, Moncton, Sainte-Anne and I believe Saint-Jean. I did not want to give the impression that nothing useful or good is being done. It is just that notwithstanding the positives, a lot more must be done. Again, funding in general has suffered, partly because of the crunch, and when the economy is in a stage of development, as opposed to a stage of maturity, it hurts a little more. That is the point I was making, but you are right.
Senator Forest: I just wanted to make one more point. I have seen a difference in attitude at the university in that they are embarking on a large fund-raising campaign, and $3 million of that will be earmarked for a chair at Faculté Saint-Jean. I think we need to talk a little bit about the good things.
Mr. D'Entremont: We have very good cooperation with all universities at AUCC. The witnesses before us talked about the Acadians in Nova Scotia, the faculty unions talked about the need, although we are a very small part of it, and although it is francophonie hors Quebec, since the inception of the regroupement in 1990 the Quebec universities have been participating in all our meetings. They even participate in our executive committee meetings. When we founded the institution at Sudbury in 1990 Michel Gervais, president of Laval, had a strike starting the same day. He still came to Sudbury. Basically, he said, "I promised I would be with my colleagues outside of Quebec", and he made it.
Like I said, we are not anti anything, we are pro and we have developed that approach. We also have good relationships with the University of Alberta, York and other universities in and outside of Quebec.
The Chairman: Thank you for your excellent brief, in both official languages, and if we have any further questions we will be in touch with you.
The committee adjourned.