Thank you very much for the opportunity to address the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance.
The Ontario College of Art and Design is a specialized university, a member of AUCC and the COU.
I want to speak about three issues that OCAD addresses in our written submission.
The first is design strategy. Design creates innovative processes, systems, and products and is the fundamental engine to drive intellectual property in Canada.
Countries with a high innovation and competitiveness ranking invest in design at all points in the supply chain. Product design and development, a Canadian manufacturing perspective, identifies design as the critical element in achieving better productivity, and, according to Industry Canada, firms identify design as being of value in affecting time to market, new products' success rates, and the percentage of revenue from new products.
Design drives innovation throughout the digital industries, gaming, mobile applications, and so on, and design transfers research from the bench to commercial product. Design redirects business capacity to new products and markets and bridges cultures to create universal or individualized products.
Canada needs a design strategy, one that will promote Canadian design, invest in design education, and target design research to the granting councils and CECR initiatives in commercialized network development.
We need to create capacity in IRAP to support design innovation and the redesign of business processes and encourage partnerships with Canadian design firms.
Second is our physical and virtual infrastructure. Through public-private partnerships, we need to greatly enhance Canada's broadband capacity, continue to strengthen our country's mobile Internet, and support the super-computing networks that are fundamental to Canada's research and commercialization and post-secondary competitiveness.
A digital strategy for Canada can enable such partnerships and strengthen the delivery of e-learning, provide access to democratic engagement for all Canadians, and bring Canadian businesses online, supporting the success of Canada's digital industries, a highly competitive sector.
OCAD has created a proposal for a digital future centre with a request to the federal government for $12 million toward this unique national beacon. We are happy to say that the province has supported us both through its training and colleges and university sector and research and innovation, and we encourage the federal government to do so.
Next is aboriginal post-secondary education. All significant studies of aboriginal post-secondary education note the importance of developing programs that will engage aboriginal youth while building the capacity and knowledge of these communities in their own right.
Within the larger Canadian context, new generations of aboriginal artists, designers, architects, and media producers and the application of their skills to other domains such as health care will create significant transformative economies and economic benefits for these communities while contributing to Canadian and international cultures.
Despite the well-documented importance of culture to aboriginal well-being, creativity, and economic capacity, there is very limited availability of programs dedicated to aboriginal visual culture, art, design, and commercialization of art and design in this country.
Hence we encourage the federal government to expand university educational opportunities for aboriginal Canadians by increasing financial support to students of aboriginal descent and investing directly in innovative university programs such as OCAD's aboriginal visual culture programs that provide access to aboriginal undergraduate and graduate students.
There is a link between these three points. Investing in aboriginal learning, linking an effective broadband strategy to all regions of Canada, and understanding the critical role of design in fact will help Canada to be truly competitive.
Thank you very much.