Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, committee members and fellow witnesses. I'm pleased to be joining you again today to contribute to this committee's ongoing commitment to bettering the lives of veterans across Canada. I commend MP Blaney for suggesting this study and fo

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you, Patricia, for those words and for sharing your own experiences. Willis College and Cape Breton career college are leading from the front on best practices supporting women veterans in our sector. I felt it was important to hear from a college on what they are doing t

Veterans Affairs committee  We can never stop communicating. It's what we've learned in our association. We can never stop telling people what we do to convince people of the value of the regulated career college sector in Canada. It's to never stop communicating and to find those partnerships and places, a

Veterans Affairs committee  Can I add one more comment I should have mentioned? It's just an opportunity that we can all take. Consider this an invitation to tour our college. Come see what we're doing on the ground. See if you think it's a good fit to understand veterans going through that process and whe

Veterans Affairs committee  While we don't have the path yet, we are very committed to trying to find some of that data. I think it is important as we look at our veterans who have served and their families. I'll tell you what we are committed to: Each and every one of our colleges across Canada is committe

Veterans Affairs committee  Our personal support worker program, as it's called in Ontario—it seems to be taught under different names in almost every province in the country—has been around for quite a long time. It has been accredited by the provincial regulators that we operate under in every province.

Veterans Affairs committee  Many of our career colleges, our regulated career colleges, work closely with the community colleges and the universities nearby. We like that partnership. We believe we have a role to play and they have a role to play. To give you an example of some of those programs, we're ge

Veterans Affairs committee  One thing I'd like to share is around the small, intimate size of the classroom. You tend to have a smaller classroom size and a faster program. As I mentioned earlier, back-to-school day for us, as I like to say, is Monday. It's Thursday. It's not necessarily the first Tuesday a

Veterans Affairs committee  As I said earlier, I turn it around on ourselves as well. I think we can do more to encourage the education of veterans and active military on the options that are available to them using our channels, our social media, our marketing, our career fairs and our job fairs. I put the

Veterans Affairs committee  Could I add one comment?

Veterans Affairs committee  For me to answer that question it's tricky, because every province is different, and I get lots of apples and oranges. Everybody studies it differently and gathers it differently, or doesn't gather it, or gathers it in ways that are ineffective. Ontario has just changed the way t

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, I'm pleased to do that. There's one thing that I'd like to talk about, and I should have mentioned this when Mr. Richards asked me. One of the best practices when we talk about this family program is at Willis College here in Ottawa, which unleashed a $2-million scholarship

Veterans Affairs committee  We're proposing today the start of a conversation. I have not yet put together, with pen to paper, what we'd exactly like to see, because we don't believe we're the only partner at the table. We believe the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Council of Canada, trade unions, emplo

Veterans Affairs committee  I don't have statistics specific to veterans, but I do have some interesting studies I can share with you from Ontario that are focused around the type of learners we have and the success rates they tend to have. We have found that in regulated career colleges, we have a higher

Veterans Affairs committee  I am aware of a few companies that have looked at this. I don't know of anyone who has done it. We took your challenge of finding recommendations to bring to you today that could be valuable. We believe that putting together a group of employers and trade associations, which ar