Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of this committee, for including us in your important week of pre-budget hearings.
Polytechnics Canada represents leading research-intensive, publicly funded polytechnics and colleges. All our members grant bachelor's degrees and offer industry-aligned post-secondary credentials, including trades training.
A polytechnic education builds a resilient and resourceful workforce. Canada needs more of this kind of applied education. Our education and training and our R and D and commercialization services help employers and companies to grow. The work our members do provides a cornerstone for building and supporting Canada's middle class.
As you seek ideas for economic growth, polytechnic education is one of the solutions Canada needs more of, whether it be tackling youth unemployment, supporting workers who form the bedrock of the middle class, or building the technical talent required for green infrastructure. Canada needs talent and innovation ecosystems where all players contribute their unique strengths.
For too long Canada's productivity has been held back by our fragmented, siloed, and incomplete approaches to talent and innovation. To bridge excellence to access, discovery to commercialization, and smart workers to smart jobs, we need an inclusive approach. Despite progress made in recent years, federal supports for an inclusive national talent strategy remain imbalanced and inadequate.
Let's remember that people innovate and companies commercialize. Innovation without talent is like science without ideas.
Our universities and academic scientists play a crucial role, but they can't get their inventions to market without attention being paid to the rest of the ecosystem—the R and D technicians and industry partners who bring innovations to the marketplace, especially in our small and mid-size businesses. The value of discovery research is not realized until people also perform the collaborative near-to-market work such as prototyping, beta testing, and market validation at which polytechnics excel, with their industry partners.
Unmuzzling science will not spur innovation. We need to unleash the innovative talent of polytechnic graduates and support the practical needs of Canada's entrepreneurs outside academe.
Our written submission presents a suite of 10 targeted investments that would both strengthen our ecosystem for the long term and help kick-start our economic turnaround in the short term. There are three broad categories of proposals: one, balancing supports for innovation; two, delivering Canada's infrastructure priorities with apprenticeship action; and three, building a modern labour force through better data.
Let me give you highlights. With respect to innovation, we call for increased funding for NSERC's college and community innovation program by $15 million annually. Currently the program is oversubscribed, having to limit competitions for funding while also spending funds intended for future competitions now. Yet this $53-million program makes up only a paltry 5% of NSERC's annual billion-dollar budget. In the private sector when something is in demand because it works, you supply more of it.
No policy rationale exists for excluding the college sector from equitable support for staff and infrastructure costs that support our legitimate research activities. This is an imbalance that can easily be fixed by increasing the research support fund by $25 million, and in doing so, signal fair treatment for all post-secondary research, not just university research.
To ensure Canada has the skilled workers needed to build and maintain our infrastructure over the next decade, polytechnics offer a variety of world-leading programs in construction management and the building trades; however, many of these programs have long waiting lists, while employers are reporting shortages of these very skilled workers. Therefore, we recommend a high-demand training capacity fund.
Finally, Canada needs reliable labour market information that leads to informed career choices. If employers and learners had access to accurate information about the publicly funded professional print and technical training programs we offer, and about the earning power of our polytechnic graduates, we would be better able to guide young Canadians toward programs with solid employment prospects. Possible financial incentives for more co-op opportunities need to be evidence-based. Better LMI leads to better prospects for our unemployed, our older workers, newcomers and indigenous learners, and even temporary foreign workers. Federal leadership in investment for evidence-based labour market data is vital now.
I hope you will take time to consider our recommendations. Growing the Canadian economy requires harnessing the many solutions offered by a polytechnic education.