Thank you, Mr. Chair. We would like to thank you and the members of the committee for inviting the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations here today. We're an alliance of 24 student associations representing 400,000 university and college students across Canada.
Today we want to highlight why education spending in a time of austerity is a crucial investment. To begin, I'd like to provide some context by discussing the OECD's annual education report, which was issued last week. Canadian university attainment has grown for 25- to 34-year-olds, but much more slowly than our peers. That places us 12th in the OECD and at the bottom of the G-7 countries. Canada's key education investments were made nearly a generation ago, and we can't continue to coast if we really want to continue our country's knowledge advantage. Furthermore, our demographic changes are generating new challenges to Canada's economic growth. This makes advancements in innovation and productivity even more important than they are today. By 2025, the number of persons who will be retiring from the workforce will exceed newcomers by over 34%.
What CASA believes is that education investment is the best way to combat this. It provides technical abilities and develops critical thinking skills crucial to the development and adoption of new ideas and technologies.
The federal government chose to cut investment in education in the mid-1990s to reduce the deficit. Due to these cuts, Canada faced a brain drain, where essentially our graduates and our highly indebted researchers left to find opportunities elsewhere. What CASA believes is that we can't afford to take the easy road out of a deficit by cutting education spending now. Investing in education is an opportunity to build human infrastructure and essentially strengthen Canada's economic position.
Spencer will be going through the specifics of our pre-budget submission, but these are the considerations that went into our submission today.