As you know, education is a provincial jurisdiction, and one of the things that has been happening over the last 10 to 20 years is systemic underfunding of education, unfortunately. That systemic underfunding has created, like I said in my opening statement, fewer resources for students and much more difficult working conditions.
If we look to the north, I was really lucky. I got to visit Nunavut this year to talk to the teachers up there. Teachers in the south, if you would like to call that the south, when there were no jobs in the south, would move up to the north. Some of them stayed because the north is quite an interesting place to work and an interesting place to live, like the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Now not as many people are going up north, and the reason is.... You just have to look across the country. In the fall of 2023, Quebec announced 8,500 teachers missing from the system.
In Ontario, for example, there are about 37,000 teachers who are part of the College of Teachers, but they're not in classrooms. Where have they gone? During the pandemic, as you said, teachers realized that they could do other things. They started exploring other job opportunities that were perhaps less stressful, and they didn't have to bring as much work home on the weekends and in the evenings, etc.
We are seeing a retention and recruitment crisis across Canada, and it's going to get worse because retirements are going to start going up. That's why the loan forgiveness program for the north is really important. If we want to attract teachers to the north, it's no longer what it was before where there were no jobs, and let's go to the north and see. I met teachers up there from Newfoundland and New Brunswick who have stayed their entire career up there. They went there as young teachers because there were no jobs in the south, and they stayed up there.
It's a really important little piece. I know that loan forgiveness is already there for nurses and doctors for that same reason, to gravitate people to remote communities and rural communities. Yes, unfortunately, education in this country is going through a bit of a crisis right now. These three things that I talked about—mental health, loan forgiveness and the universal school food program—are all going to be very helpful.
Even just speaking about the universal school food program, we know that classrooms are becoming more and more violent, unfortunately. Believe it or not, they are the little ones in kindergarten and grade one who lost two years of socialization. There was research in Toronto that showed that a food program brought down violence in schools. I think this is going to be good for classroom complexity as well.
I could go on. I like to talk.