Finance committee  I'll just tell a story of an epiphany on how we can get the information out. Just a few months ago I was in Calgary. About 600 kids were in the audience and I had put up a chart that we had created as part of our recent spotlight on science learning report. It was a series of t

Finance committee  I will be very brief. I want to underscore that the parents are the number one influencer, but I'm not entirely sure I'd encourage the committee to go as far as to focus on promoting only one particular area. I think we have an amazing opportunity to talk about a new generati

Finance committee  Quite a lot of international research has focused on the barriers. Depending on the age of the young people, the barriers are slightly different. At the high school level, it's a lack of role models; the lack of perceived relevance is actually quite large. Often the amount that's

Finance committee  A lot of the work we're doing is with the universities, colleges, industry, and the provinces to build that context. I do want to point out that most teachers in the country haven't had employability opportunities outside the classroom, yet even 50 years ago the conversation we

Finance committee  Role models, mentoring, contextualization—I'm not entirely sure I'd go as far as categorizing it as just career mentoring, but that's definitely a component of it. The other piece to keep in mind with the whole STEM field is that it's not just trying to prepare people for knowle

Finance committee  Okay. Our research is showing that we're building their employability skills enormously. The third point I have is around talent development, starting in the sandboxes. I had mentioned earlier that I really do urge the committee to define how early you begin thinking about who y

Finance committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to the committee. As the founder of Let's Talk Science, I've spent the last 20-plus years trying to help ensure that Canadian youth are ready for and prepared to thrive in a very different kind of work environment. I think my tak

Human Resources committee  We used to have one. I began to get many calls from the parents of boys and from science consultants and coordinators at school boards saying they were having far more challenges keeping boys in the system than girls. I know this is a really sensitive area, but through elementary

Human Resources committee  That's a very good question. I don't know if they're changing disciplines. Do you mean they're dropping out at the high school level?

Human Resources committee  What we're finding with our benchmarking study is that typically at the end of high school, only about 40% to 50% of students have completed their biology courses. About 20% to 30% have completed their chemistry, and 10% to 20% have completed their physics courses. The polls we'v

Human Resources committee  I believe it is very much that they are poorly informed, and I go back to the parents as well. There was another survey done last year that asked parents about their perceptions about the importance of science. New Canadians were very high in their recognition of that. Canadian p

Human Resources committee  It's interesting you ask that. We will be releasing our study later in May. We looked at a few provinces. One of the quite surprising things is that Saskatchewan is graduating a higher proportion of students from their high schools with credits in science. When we looked into i

Human Resources committee  I didn't say that.

Human Resources committee  We have pretty good distribution of our revenue. We have funding from FedDev and we are supported by three of the granting councils, but in small, peer-reviewed grant applications. We have good funding from industry partners and foundation partners, and we have a small stream of

Human Resources committee  We do that now. We've actually put lots of kits together for use by teachers or by volunteers. Starting with pre-K and kindergarten, they look at friction and movement. They go all the way up to grade 12, where they look at leading-edge biotechnology. We are able to do that. Th