Thank you very much. Mr. Chair, I am very happy to have the opportunity to appear before you today.
As mentioned, my name is Marie Carter. I am the chief operating officer of Engineers Canada. We're the national body that represents the 12 provincial and territorial regulators of the engineering profession. Our regulators license over 250,000 professional engineers in all disciplines across the country. The regulators' role is public safety. Their role is to ensure that licensed engineers are held to the highest standards of engineering education, professional qualifications, and professional practice.
I'd like to start today by speaking about how Engineers Canada impacts engineering in Canada and about our role and that of federal policy-makers in addressing the challenges we anticipate.
It takes a team effort to get the right engineer in the right place at the right time. Engineers Canada's members and volunteers, the regulators and our volunteers, are committed to making sure there's consistent engineering education across Canada. We already have 271 accredited undergraduate engineering programs in the country at this time. We monitor and recognize international engineering degree programs as well. We're the keepers of several mutual recognition agreements with other countries.
Through our qualifications board, we bring together engineering regulators to work toward consistency on admissions to the profession, continuing professional development requirements for our engineers, engineering-in-training programs and student affairs, sustainability and environmental affairs, professional standards, and discipline and enforcement.
Engineers Canada publishes national guidelines and model guides for practice. We maintain a national examination syllabus, which is used by our regulators to assess academic qualifications of immigrant engineers. We do a lot of research. We investigate emerging engineering areas and emerging practices that are going on worldwide.
I'd like to address the state of engineering in Canada and the policy problems we expect to face.
We know that our engineers are well recognized as experts, leaders, and innovators, and our talented professionals have an important role to play in protecting the public.
As the need for the contributions of engineers to society grows, one of our biggest policy challenges will be how to respond to the looming engineering skills shortage.
We recently released a labour market study, and in that study you'll see that in most jurisdictions across the country there will be shortages of engineers with five to 10 years of experience or specialized skills, while new graduates from engineering programs may have difficulty finding jobs.
We are anticipating a high number of retirements, as we know from the demographics in Canada. Engineering is no different. By 2020 we should see approximately 95,000 engineers either fully or partially retiring.
Today we've got approximately 60,000 undergraduate students in accredited programs across the country. They'll help the shortage somewhat. Combined with an estimated 16,000 new engineering jobs, recruiting into the profession is going to require some focused attention by the regulators, employers, academia, and governments.
Engineers Canada and the provincial and territorial regulators are working together to address the labour shortage as well as we can by promoting diversity in the profession. Therefore, we have a focus at the moment on attracting what we see as the untapped resources in Canada for engineering, those being women and indigenous people.
If we go back to the 2006 census, the most recent information available to us, women comprised 47% of the total workforce but only 13% of the engineering workforce, which is a significant increase from 20 years prior. The rate of engagement by indigenous people is also very low. We're approaching these two groups of people differently because the issues in trying to attract them into engineering are different.
We're also coordinating with federal government efforts to streamline the immigration system. At the moment, more than one in five professional engineers in Canada came from offshore and is an immigrant to this country. We've got quite a substantial number of immigrant engineers working in Canada and licensed in Canada.
Annually our regulators process about 5,500 applications from immigrants. We know that is about the highest in the regulated professions. We are looking at working with the streamlined efforts that are going on with the federal government. We have our regulators on board with us to help with that effort.
Everybody here at the table today works together on a fairly regular basis, so I'm going to leave it to my colleagues to address the question of whether or not we're globally competitive and where those opportunities and growth might be.
In closing, I would like to stress that I think we should all be proud of the engineers in the country who do so much to keep our communities safe, support and contribute to our economic prosperity, and drive innovation in the country. I look forward to continuing working with our federal government to support growth in this area.