Finance committee  In terms of growth, we still see ongoing demand both from company sponsors and students. This year we'll do about 3,000 internships. We have a goal of 10,000 over the next five to seven years. We have a couple of people in the organization whose primary responsibility is tracking

Finance committee  I couldn't comment. All of our participants are students, and they're not governed by any sort of employment laws. We just don't have the expertise to comment.

Finance committee  I'll just quickly say that certainly at Mitacs we do a lot of work with, as you might expect, things like engineering and so on, but in fact about a quarter of our internships now are done with students from the social sciences and humanities, and oftentimes those skills are very

Finance committee  Well, the short answer is just as a matter of principle.

Finance committee  We don't, but that's largely because it just isn't a topic we engage with.

Finance committee  We don't work with unpaid internship arrangements.

Finance committee  One significant difference is that in many cases, these unpaid internships—and this is really just my own personal understanding—are often used essentially almost as an employment substitute. Our programs are really geared towards integrated training experience and research for

Finance committee  Yes, all of our interns are paid. They receive a stipend, which is the equivalent of what they would be receiving as a graduate student at one of the universities.

Finance committee  We're made aware by the sorts of discussions that are being generated around the table. We certainly make the argument to the employers that we engage with that, of course, there's value obviously in the work that they're getting here. So that's a key part. All of our programs ha

Finance committee  It would work out to, roughly, somewhere between $25,000 to $30,000 a year, on an annual pro-rated basis, which is about what graduate student receive as an annual stipend.

Finance committee  Absolutely.

Finance committee  We were very pleased about the investment in Elevate. Really that's in response to something that was coming back to us from our industrial partners that we work with in our other programs, in Accelerate, for instance. Essentially there are two parts to the question. The first p

Finance committee  Yes. The last piece is really the fact that we have an excess of post-doctoral researchers who aren't going to find faculty positions, so really it was a match of excess labour with demand.

Finance committee  We are passionate about internships and experiential learning because we've seen them work time and again. They leverage the strengths of our existing educational institutions with the opportunity to engage directly with those firms that understand in-demand skills best. We sin

Finance committee  Thanks. Good afternoon, honourable members. Thank you for the opportunity to present to the committee today. Mitacs is a national, independent, not-for-profit research organization that supports Canadian innovation through collaborative research projects that link Canadian busi