Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I can accept that possibly I am mistaken and there is not an issue here of transition in students who were formerly eligible for benefits because the criteria was residency and now is years of schooling.
I would like some clarification from Mr. Ootes, because we do have students who have been told they will not be eligible for funding now because they attended high school in the south, although their parents were residents the whole time.
If they are being told that by the department, and Mr. Ootes has a different understanding, then we need to work this out.
The second thing I wanted to reiterate is that I believe Mr. Ootes and the department know exactly, probably to the hundreds of dollars, how much it would cost to extend the new program and new eligibility of semesters to all the students currently in the system, and by in the system I mean anybody who last year was in their fourth year of university or less. That is the excuse we have been given for not extending these added semesters to all the students in the system. It is a matter of money. We are asked to consider that excuse and that reason because these are tight fiscal times, and we do realize that they are tight fiscal times.
However, we would like to see exactly how much money we are talking about here. If we are only talking about $500,000 in additional new money, how much possibly could we be talking about for extending these semesters to students in the system? I believe we want kids to go on and get a masters level of education.
I do not want to ask any more questions here. I do not want to compound things, but if I am mistaken about residency and years of schooling, then we will have to get the students to come back to the department for new information. I would like to hear dollar amounts as far as how much it would have cost to extend the additional semesters to students in the system. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.