Thank you.
Our thanks to you for including us in your important annual hearings.
I'm Nobina Robinson and I'd like to recognize Dr. David Ross, president and CEO of SAIT Polytechnic in Calgary, one of my board members and someone whose support is critical to our advocacy success.
Polytechnics Canada's 10 recommendations for next year's federal budget encompass two of your themes: increasing competitiveness through R and D, and maximizing job opportunities for Canadians.
In fact, innovation and jobs are vitally linked in our view. It is people who innovate, not institutions. So we need a 21st century workforce that knows how to innovate, and you know that I will continue to advocate that college and polytechnic advanced applied education build the much sought-after innovation skills for all Canadian workers. I will provide concrete examples today that underpin our recommendations, but I hope you will ask me more about our substantive ideas to improve innovation, labour market, and trades training outcomes in Canada.
Our 11 members are publicly funded, research-intensive colleges and institutes. We are demand-driven and industry-responsive in all that we do. Your committee's focus on competitiveness is absolutely correct. So let me share a small example of how our members are enabling a whole industry sector to compete.
In 2012 the college and community innovation program, CCIP, awarded Sheridan College in Oakville a five-year grant to establish the Screen Industry's Research and Training Centre. A year later, 36 local regional companies and organizations from Ontario's digital media industry have partnered with over 180 Sheridan students and faculty on industry-led applied research. If you want an example of how colleges and polytechnics spur commercialization, then consider how Red River College in Winnipeg is using another CCIP award to purchase tools and equipment to serve the needs of an industry consortium involved in an all-electric transit bus project designed to test lithium battery life in Manitoba's extreme winter weather.
If you want more such success, then we recommend an increase to CCIP, the sole NSERC program supporting college-applied research, and now stalled because demand for our R and D collaborations is outstripping supply. Worse, thousands of small Canadian firms are now forced to put innovation on hold.
And then consider how neither Sheridan nor Red River nor any of our other members nor other colleges can access the same supports for their indirect costs of research as their university counterparts. This leads me to our second research-related recommendation, namely to increase the funds for the indirect costs of research programs and to allow the CCIP I just mentioned to be eligible. We can find no policy rationale for this exclusion. Stable, predictable funding helps to build our industry liaison capacity and to increase our industry-driven research projects.
Your other concern for maximizing job opportunities requires that we as a country and more importantly, that the federal government once and for all recognize the consensus that now exists, after a year or more of skills debate and labour market turmoil, that Canada needs to invest in reliable accurate and timely labour market information. Your own committee's hearings this spring on youth employment recognized the need for action on this important issue. This is why we recommend the creation of a labour market information council that will make both demand and supply side data available to all Canadians, learners, workers, educators, and parents alike.
With the persistent threat of not enough certified journeypersons in high demand trades professions, the same labour market information council could modernize how we track Canada's 400,000 apprentices. Through the creation of a national registered apprenticeship number, we could gain crucial information about progress, mobility, and barriers faced by apprentices. And if demand is outstripping supply of talent for the skilled trades profession, consider our recommendation on high-demand training capacity needs. Each of our members has examples to give you of the numbers of qualified applicants we are turning away due to lack of space, lack of instructors, lack of equipment.
Above all, we need to de-risk investment in trades training if we're to grow the number of certified people. This is why we have recommended an employer tax credit for employers of record who see a Red Seal apprentice through to certification.
The modern innovation process is far more collaborative than ever before, involving teams of researchers, technicians, specialists, and even tradespeople. Connecting talent to polytechnics should be a high priority for your committee's deliberations.
Thank you.