Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm Bob Gillett, president of Algonquin College, in Ontario, but I'm also representing all colleges of Ontario today.
I'd like to begin by thanking the committee for giving us this opportunity to present to you. We would like to also say how much we support the recent decision by the Honourable Jim Flaherty to set capital funding aside for post-secondary education. It certainly is a necessity at this time.
We'd like to reiterate our support for the brief you've already heard from the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, and we'll reiterate some of the six points they've already made to you.
For those of you who don't know community colleges in Ontario, they represent 160,000 full-time students and 500,000 part-time students and offer programs and courses from apprentice courses right up to full degrees, and they have a long, successful history of doing that. They are very much a partnership organization with industry, labour, non-profit community-based groups, and others, and graduate approximately 60,000 new employees into the system every year. They serve about 25,000 apprenticeships, about 11,000 people in literacy, and about 27,000 young people in Job Connect. They also work in about 100 countries around the world.
Just for the members of the committee, employers express 90% high satisfaction with the quality of graduates they are receiving.
To turn to the central point of the presentation today, Mr. Chairman, we'd like to reiterate some of the points made by the ACCC--first of all, that we need to increase access to post-secondary education in Ontario. As you've seen, HRSDC has said that almost 75% of all jobs now require some form of post-secondary. We think that is going to continue to increase. Already in Canada we are seeing labour shortages in trades, manufacturing, nursing, and others. We believe that's a scenario the federal government should be paying a great deal of attention to.
We believe that for our country to continue to be as prosperous as it has been, we need to invest in quality, capacity, and access to Canada's post-secondary systems. Of course, we are speaking on behalf of colleges, which are the institutions that deliver most of the skills education. We believe that the massive cuts made to post-secondary education in the past have had serious impacts. We furthermore believe that the blend of post-secondary education transfers into the Canada health and social transfer group has actually taken away transparency and accountability back to the Parliament.
We would like to make the suggestion to your committee, Mr. Chair, that like health, we get exempted from that grouping and have a separate fund set up for colleges or post-secondary education in general.
We also see great needs in the infrastructure forefront, and because we have to take more students, because we need to increase access and get more people with a post-secondary education, we would like to see funding come from the federal government directly to the institutions to allow access to increase, and to increase the infrastructure and the equipment to meet the standards that employers need today.
We also see the need for training, and skills, and apprenticeship. There is a study that shows about $600 million is required to upgrade equipment to meet current standards for the new employment work sites. Mr. Chairman, we also believe that since there are equipment challenges in health, applied sciences, engineering technologies, and other skills training programs, we recommend that a very specific fund be set up with clear accountability to help that happen.
Mr. Chairman, we echo the six recommendations of the ACCC, and we would like to thank the members of the finance committee for giving us the opportunity to reinforce the points that have already been made to you. Colleges do create the skilled labour pool for the future, and we want to be key partners with all levels of government to ensure that every young person in Canada has that opportunity to have the prosperity that their parents and others have had in the past.
We thank you for that opportunity.