Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I thank the members on the committee for giving me the opportunity to make a presentation today.
Mohawk College is well known in Ontario as the gateway to southwestern Ontario, but it is simultaneously at the outer urban edge of the greater Toronto and Hamilton area. In the brief we presented to you in the summer, we have to correct a few numbers. We're pleased to say that we had a 14% growth in enrolment this past fall, 7% from general enrolment and 7% due to international and second career students, who are workers who have been laid off and are looking for new opportunities. So actually, we now serve 11,500 full-time students, 4,000 apprenticeship students, and 375 international students.
What is unique, perhaps, about the marketplace we serve is the lack of access to post-secondary education, not in Burlington but in Hamilton and in Brantford. In Hamilton roughly 54% of the population and in Brantford 55% of the population have not accessed post-secondary education, and as many studies have revealed, 70% of the future jobs in our economy will demand post-secondary education. So we suggested to the committee in our brief that there were three things we thought were fairly important.
The first was that we're building a new centre for entrepreneurship learning and innovation. The new centre, thanks to a $20 million investment from the Government of Ontario, will allow us to imbue our graduates with the capacity to start their own businesses and help small businesses grow. As part of our research into achieving this goal, we started to look at all the opportunities there were in the Government of Canada to help entrepreneurial young people. We discovered that there were the Business Development Bank of Canada, the Canadian small business financing program, the Small Business Finance Centre, and the Canadian Youth Business Foundation.
All of these had very impressive websites, but there was not a coordinated approach to marketing the services of those organizations, and we believe that by and large our students are not aware of them. We think it would be a great idea if these organizations were encouraged to consolidate a marketing effort and to present themselves to graduates of universities and colleges, from NAIT or SIAST or wherever, who would like to start their own businesses and help small businesses grow.
So it's our suggestion that perhaps the standing committee might suggest to these organizations, which I gather are in some cases at arm's length, that there are other opportunities that they could take advantage of in order to encourage greater economic development in the country.
The second proposal has to do with continuing the knowledge infrastructure program. In the past round of funding, Mohawk either was too ambitious or perhaps didn't have quite the right angle, and we were declined funding. We accept that. However, we're looking forward to where we're going next and are saying that with the growth we're experiencing, we believe there should be ongoing rounds.
One of the challenges is unique to Ontario. The Ontario government funds all the colleges out of one pot, and the number of students you have establishes a percentage that is your market share of the total volume of that pot. If all the colleges around us are growing with new facilities and we're challenged to grow without new facilities, our market share will go down and our annual operating grant will actually go down. So there would be not only the disadvantage of not having a beautiful new building—although we will have one—there will be the disadvantage of losing market share and thereby operational funding.
In Brantford, we have a lot of encouragement from the city to relocate our industrial zone campus to downtown Brantford. So we're proposing that perhaps the Government of Canada, in renewing the program, might consider $20 million for Mohawk.
Finally, on behalf of President Rob MacIsaac and the whole college, we'd like to say that we support totally the objectives of the Government of Canada in trying to achieve Advantage Canada: Building a Strong Economy for Canadians.
Thank you. If you have questions, I am ready to answer in either official language.