Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and honourable committee members.
I am joined by our vice-president of public affairs, Terry Anne Boyles, this afternoon.
First, I want to congratulate the committee on the extraordinary work it has undertaken across Canada over the past few weeks. You really have travelled a lot. You have met so many Canadians. I commend you for your energy and your commitment to this process.
We represent 155 institutions of higher education that stretch into every part of Canada. Remarkably, these institutions operate 1,000 campuses in communities across the country. Although we're called the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, in fact there are only three community colleges in Canada. Polytechnics, CÉGEPs, institutes of technology, and universities with a college mandate also comprise our membership.
We have limited our presentation and our brief to three issues only. The first is Canada's lagging productivity. Over the past 50 years, Canada has dropped from third position in the OECD to 17th position in terms of per capita output. Our response seems to have been very large investments in discovery and pure research, primarily in universities, the thinking being that this would somehow increase productivity. In fact, we're not winning at this game. We think that we have to talk more about applied research and the role of colleges in supporting that aspect.
In 2008-2009, no fewer than 3,481 companies, primarily SMEs, turned to colleges for help with applied research, product and process innovation, commercialization, and technology transfer. That is six times more than we reported in 2006. Rather than bury you with explanations, statistics, and details, we have provided a summary, a sampling, of many of these types of relationships, defining in very few words the nature of the technologies and the comments of our private sector partners. Please take a few minutes to read this. If you were ever doubtful about the college role in supporting the innovation economy, you will be persuaded by this short document.
We seek a modest 5% of federal investment in research to support this work. There is some very modest support currently, but it's less than one-half of 1% of the federal investment in research overall.
I'll talk about advanced skills as well as about the challenges of our institutions in this recessionary period. We had long wait lists of students before the recession hit, before hundreds of thousands of Canadians literally turned to colleges for upgrading and new careers. We thank you so much for the knowledge infrastructure program. It really made a difference. Colleges got about 30% of the $2 billion in federal dollars, cost shared with the provinces. It has made a difference, but we still face an enormous challenge.
We have a recommendation. I know that you will say that the cupboard is bare, and it is bare. But college graduates get employment, even in this economy. There's been no decrease in the take-up of college graduates for employment. If we can get more students through the system and out the other end, we'll contribute greatly to Canada's economy.
A remarkable phenomenon in this period is the enrollment of university graduates in colleges. The colleges' success in getting their graduates into employment is recognized by many university graduates, and increasingly large numbers go to colleges for the advanced skills employers need to keep the economy going.
Our final recommendation pertains to Indian and Inuit post-secondary education and the support programs for that. I'm not sure that there's not enough money here. But there are so many programs and so many confused and conflicting criteria and so much control of the spending seemingly in uncertain places that the outcomes just aren't being realized.
We're producing more high school graduates that could enter post-secondary education, but there are funding challenges, and we urge you to consider that.
Mr. Chairman, thank you so much. There are many details in our brief.