Thank you.
The Association of Canadian Community Colleges represents Canada's colleges, specialized institutes such as the Michener Institute, polytechnics, CEGEPs, university colleges, and colleges with university mandates. Our membership is very broad. We have 150 member institutions and we have campuses in over 1,000 Canadian communities.
There is a crisis in advanced skills in the country. Even with the recession and the downturn in the economy, industry sectors across the board have been coming to the association saying they're very concerned about this.
Twenty national industry associations, including the Canadian Healthcare Association, led by Pamela Fralick, are meeting. They're concerned that they're raiding each other's staff, particularly when you're looking at people with backgrounds in maths and sciences. Moving forward, they're really concerned about the capacity of Canada's colleges and institutes. Pamela Fralick is actually one of the leaders when we appear before the finance committee speaking about that concern and crisis.
On the aboriginal front, first nations institutions are members, but certainly our colleges serve aboriginal peoples. We share with the Assembly of First Nations the real concern about the cap on the post-secondary education program for status Indians and Inuit. There were over 10,500 students on the wait lists in 2006. Our estimate with the AFN is that they're growing at 3,000 per year.
In the math and science areas in particular, we're really concerned. I was a college president. We're seeing the people de-skill, and we're seeing them becoming almost discouraged and not going on to post-secondary, or it's discouraging to other people from their communities about going into post-secondary education.
On the immigration front, I just want to draw the committee's attention to materials in our kit. Our association ran the pilots for the Government of Canada for immigrants between when they're accepted and when they come to Canada, to introduce them to the regulatory frameworks, to the region of the country they're moving into, to the bridges and ladders in terms of accreditation processes. We've just been awarded the contract to expand that to 25 countries overall, so we'll be opening up a new office in London and one in the Middle East shortly.
In our recommendations—and those are on the last page of the document—they really talk about the capacity issue and that the system programs are full; the aging infrastructure; the cost of technology; and recruitment of our faculty out into the health sector and into other countries—a major concern. There's a dearth of data on health human resources.
I'd like to have Rae Gropper just speak to one of our big national projects.