Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Again, thanks to everyone on the panel for the opportunity. It's just wonderful to have you in the great city of Saskatoon in the great province of Saskatchewan. It's a two-block walk from my office to here, so it's a delight.
As the previous speakers have done, please allow me to set the context of my remarks and our recommendations in our brief. I proudly serve as the president and CEO of the Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Science and Technology, more commonly known as SIAST. We serve nearly 26,000 distinct students each year, and nearly 3,000 of those students declare they're of aboriginal ancestry. We serve these students through our four urban campuses: Mr. Hoback insisted I start with the great campus in Prince Albert, which is our Woodland campus; our Kelsey campus in Saskatoon—Kelly, I hope you don't mind going second; Wascana in Regina; and Palliser in Moosejaw. And, panel members, please know we're proud to serve international students around the world through our online, web-based programming.
We are one of more than 150 colleges and technical institutes in Canada, and we are part of that acronym ACCC, the Association of Canadian Community Colleges. We are responsible for technical education, skills training, and applied research across the country.
Our overall theme in our recommendations—and we have three in our report—really is about the federal contribution in education and post-secondary education. Our recommendations are that notwithstanding provincial and federal criteria on this, we hope the federal government will continue, and in fact increase, its strong commitment and involvement in education and post-secondary education in Canada.
You can count on us in the college sector to support the training of skilled workers in our country, but we need to work together. We need all aspects of government working in that. We note with interest that HRSDC has projected a need for nearly seven million college graduates over the next seven years, along with nearly five million university graduates over that same time period. It's a wonderful challenge for us, but again, we need to be working together to meet those challenges of successful graduates.
You can count on us at SIAST, and you can count on the colleges for the HQP—those highly qualified persons—and the applied research our country needs. We work at the training, testing, and the application levels that are key to small and medium enterprise and to manufacturing in this country. I look forward to questions or comments on that.
If I may, I will just make a brief comment in the reverse order that was in our submission, because I would like to close with the aboriginal point. We need to look back to the future with regard to the federal government's involvement in the establishment of technical institutes. The first recommendation simply is that we endorse the recommendation by the Association of Canadian Community Colleges to the standing committee to establish a separate fund for post-secondary education transfer with accountability requirements directly to Parliament. We recognize that Parliament needs that accountability standard, and we fully support that.
We also are involved in applied research. That's the key. Our work is in applied research. For example, on Monday of this week I attended a meeting of industry and NGOs, where we were looking at water resources and water quality and how we could work together to make sure water quality across our country is maintained and in fact improved. So the second recommendation in our brief is that SIAST supports the ACCC recommendation to allocate 5% of federal research dollars to applied research.
Last but not least, I would like to leave the committee with the import of aboriginal education. Again, we are proud to serve 3,000 aboriginal students. We have implemented an aboriginal student achievement plan, and I look forward to describing that to you. Please don't forget aboriginal students, particularly in western Canada.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.