Thank you very much, Chair.
Thanks very much to you three for your presentations. I have a ton of questions. I don't even know where to start.
I don't think there's anybody on this committee who hasn't spent a lot of time thinking about the high level of unemployment, particularly among Canadian youth, and about what is being described as the skills shortage, and how you square that circle. How can it be that we have so many unemployed Canadians and yet we have employers who are consistently saying that it's difficult to find talent for their workplaces? I want to just explore that a little.
Obviously, universities are great incubators of skilled Canadian talent, and you've all described how you've drawn on that talent in your workplaces, but universities can't do it alone, right?
The training time through an academic program doesn't give you the just-in-time delivery of talent that you spoke about in your presentation, Mr. Elliott.
For students, you talked about needing a new narrative, for example, to attract students to the field. My sense is that it's probably more than just a narrative that students need. They probably need to know that, yes, they're not going to be described as a geek or a nerd, and that there are also some very positive reasons why they should be coming to your industry. I wonder if we could just talk a little about how we make sure students understand that the investment they make in their post-secondary education in this field will actually pay off for them.
When I was going to university, the tuition wasn't any higher for studies in IT than it was for a general arts degree. Now that's no longer the case. Particularly in Waterloo, I think the tuition is now twice as much as it is for a general arts program. For some students, that will be a barrier to getting the kind of post-secondary education that you want them to get. For some students, the work environment may prove a barrier if they aren't able to work the irregular hours that an entry-level position in the field sometimes requires.
I wonder if you could just talk a bit about what those barriers are at the post-secondary education level in regard to actually meeting your needs.