Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, and thank you for having me here today on behalf of the Council of Ontario Universities.
Issues with respect to post-secondary education are integral to the future prosperity of this country, and I do look forward to your questions and our discussion.
Innovation, productivity, and technological savvy are key predictors to success in the new economy, and these things cannot be achieved without a solid investment in education and research. Ontario’s universities are well positioned as educators and researchers to help ensure that Canada remains a leading player in the global economy. We look forward to continuing our work with the Government of Canada in achieving this goal.
Representing Ontario's 21 universities with over 400,000 full-time students and graduating over 98,000 per year, we advance higher education through advocacy, research, and policy development. Our institutions are unified by a shared commitment to student success, research excellence, and community engagement, along with the belief that education and research matter.
We're proud of our contributions to Canada's economic, cultural, and social well-being. Of all research carried out in Canada, 43% happens in Ontario. We are also major magnets for talent. Over the last 10 years international enrolment in Ontario’s universities has risen by 59%. This year alone, Ontario universities are home to over 28,000 full-time international students.
Universities are where the rubber hits the road for research and innovation policy. Through the development of critical thinking and skills, universities grow talent, many different kinds of it: engineers, lawyers, doctors, physiotherapists, entrepreneurs, marketers, administrators, scientists, journalists, teachers, financial and accounting professionals, and historians, to name a few.
Students leave our labs and classrooms equipped with the expertise and know-how that is required to support Canada's ongoing social and economic prosperity. People are Canada's greatest natural resource, and the preparation and development of the next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, and educators is critical to Canada's future. In addition to our role as educators of Canada's future talent, we train and retrain individuals whose work environments demand new skills and capabilities. That's in addition to our high engagement in the advancement of research excellence.
This research takes many forms, some of it driven by a passion for invention or fundamental research that ultimately pushes the boundaries of our thinking, experience, and understanding beyond our world today. Other research is driven by a desire to enable innovation that results in more immediate development of new practices and products, often done as contract research for companies, both domestic and international. No matter where research falls along that continuum, the contribution it makes is fundamental to the social and economic outcomes of our country and to regional economies.
In front of you today is our formal written submission to the Standing Committee on Finance in which we outline a number of important investments in a number of areas. Given the short time we have here today, I'll not take you through our full brief, many parts of which reflect our support for the recommendations that will be put forward to this committee at a later date by colleagues at the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. Rather, I'll take a few moments to speak to you about two elements of our brief that are of particular interest to Ontario universities: high performance computing and an Ontario innovation fund.
High performance computing, or HPC, as it's often called, is a supercomputing system that provides researchers and their students with the processing, storage, networking, and visualization power required to undertake complex research and analysis that exceed the capacities of normal high-end computing. It's an essential piece of research infrastructure that's required for work in a wide variety of areas. An example is the Ontario Cancer Biomarker Network to virtually connect and share resources and knowledge among protein labs across the province in the quest to better understand and diagnose cancer. There are many other examples. Canada is home to seven university-based high-performance computing consortia. Three of these, SHARCNET, SciNet, and HPCVL are housed in Ontario. Ontario networks are not only linked nationally but also globally to the United States, Shanghai, Rwanda, Brazil, and South Korea. Ontario's HPC system is currently facing significant operational and capital funding pressures, and we encourage the federal government's attention to the need to continue to invest in these areas.
We'd also like to see an expansion of an Ontario innovation fund coming out of the current ARC program, the applied research and commercialization initiative.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I look forward to your questions.