Good morning, Mr. Chair.
Good morning, everyone. I am pleased to meet you this morning.
Canada's system of community colleges is an important part of our research and development capacity in Canada. I want to tell you a few things about it.
We represent 150 community colleges, CEGEPs, university colleges, and polytechnics from all parts of Canada. We have 1,000 campuses distributed from the far south to the far north, east and west. Most of these institutions were established in the 1960s. Importantly, with a very significant federal investment and with federal leadership, they were virtually all built in a four-year period. Of course we're very tightly linked to Canada's industrial and technical drivers and we're an important part of the innovation system.
The two things I want to focus on in my five minutes are Canada's skills crisis, which is present and critical, and enhancing our entrepreneurial advantage.
As I said, the skills crisis in many sectors is already critical. Most skills in high demand are the outputs of our institutions. I could name many sectors that are crying out for more graduates. So there is immense pressure on our institutions to meet the needs of employers, but unfortunately, literally thousands of qualified students are on long wait lists to get access, sometimes as long as three years, which is particularly unfortunate since we know these graduates will be employed immediately.
Most of our institutions have great success in getting employment for their graduates, and increasingly, university graduates are coming to community college to equip themselves to get jobs. So this is an important thing for you to keep in mind. With the background in federal participation in launching the system and given the skills crisis and its potential damage to the economy, we're going to have to initiate a conversation about recapitalizing these institutions, ensuring that they have the facilities they need, the equipment they need, and the faculty they need to continue to supply the skills that drive the economy.
I'll give you a quick statistic. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business recently reported that their members who need skilled workers have indicated that out of every seven they need, six will be graduates of community colleges.
So we have some very specific thoughts about recapitalizing our institutions, but I won't initiate a large discussion here. It's something we want to talk with you about in the coming months.
We do recommend specifically that you can contribute to our success by instituting a student internship program. We have traces of that, which would be similar to the NSERC university undergraduate industrial award program. Generally speaking, we think our institutions are competitive and should have equal access to a program of that nature. We would be arguing for a national college and institute scholarship program in science and technology, something we had historically. This would stimulate student interest in this area.
We would also suggest that we expand and renew the student connections program, which is a job placement program supported by the Government of Canada, to give students experience with small businesses, and also, importantly, we would argue for the reinvestment in international student mobility. We have to keep in touch with our competitors around the world.
Speaking briefly about enhancing the entrepreneurial advantage that Canada seeks to achieve, our institutions play a critical role in this activity. In response to market pull or the interests of local businesses, our institutions support and engage with small and medium businesses, in fact businesses of all sizes, to help them with their innovation needs, their technology needs, their process needs. We have now, for the first time, importantly, a very small federal program to support this activity. It's $48 million over five years. It will provide some support to about one-fifth of our institutions. This is something we could wrap up, particularly when we have some successes to demonstrate.
When talking about the research and development strengths of our institutions, I won't go into any examples, but in your brochure there's a really interesting report on the outcomes and outputs of our colleges. You would be amazed by what they do to support local businesses. I won't even cite one example; there are many there for you to look at.
It is time for Canada to look at its enormous investment in research and balance it more equitably between support for large-scale discovery research and support for college-institute-industry partnerships. That's basically our theme. NSERC invests more than $950 million every year on people, discovery, and innovations. Our institutions receive a very small fraction of that despite their capacities.
I could go on, but basically we're looking for some equity in the system, Mr. Chair. That's my five minutes. I look forward to answering your questions.