Hello. Thank you for inviting me here today. It is an honour to be speaking to members of Parliament and the broader Canadian public.
My name is Mohammad Keyhani and I am a professor of entrepreneurship and business strategy at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary. I want to highlight and make recommendations on two issues today: digital skills and international students.
In the past several years, I have focused my teaching and research efforts on digital technologies for the next generation of entrepreneurs. Technology is rapidly changing the nature of how we launch and operate new and small businesses. An entrepreneur today has to know what a Slack channel, a growth funnel, a Zapier zap or an API is, or else they will quickly fall behind the global competition.
Canada knows that it has a digital divide problem. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the importance of digital skills and the digital economy. I want to point out that the Canada training credit program can be used for the purpose of responding to the sudden increase in demand for digital skills due to COVID-19. I want to encourage all working-age Canadians to take advantage of the Canada training credit to improve their digital skills, and as 2020 is the first year this credit is available, it can be leveraged by Canadians to respond to the new normal.
This program was inspired partly by Singapore's SkillsFuture program. In response to COVID-19, Singapore has doubled their training credits this year, and I recommend that Canada also consider increasing this, especially if it can be used for digital skills. This would also help to highlight the Canada training credit program once again for Canadians who may not be aware of it or may have forgotten about it in the midst of COVID-19.
That concludes my first recommendation.
To go on to my second point, I want to argue that international students should be covered by the CESB.
The COVID-19 crisis has prompted researchers and entrepreneurs across Canada to focus their efforts on coming up with solutions to the various issues around the pandemic. I have been fortunate to be able to join research teams in the University of Calgary and help them commercialize their COVID-19 response technologies.
One of these start-ups has been able to receive Health Canada authorization to produce a three-D printable nasopharyngeal swab to address the shortage of such swabs in Canada. Another start-up has been able to apply leading-edge microfluidic technology to create test kits for COVID-19 virus and immune response diagnostics. This technology has been supported by a generous CIHR grant from the government.
I am proud that researchers in Canada, right here in the University of Calgary, have the capabilities to develop these technologies. It has been truly inspiring to work with these tireless researchers, who get up early in the morning every day—including most weekends—to go to the lab and stay there long into the night while the country is in lockdown.
I want to highlight an interesting fact about these research teams that I've been working with. Most of them are international students. Of the few who aren't international students, most of them came to Canada initially as international students and eventually gained Canadian permanent residency.
After the tragic incident earlier this year when a Ukrainian flight was shot down in Iran, I was asked by two journalists how so many brilliant scientific minds could be on one flight. To me, this was an indication that perhaps we as a country do not fully grasp the extent to which international students and scholars are contributing to Canada.
In fact, Professor Mojgan Daneshmand of the University of Alberta, who died on that flight, had working relationships with our team and would likely be contributing to our COVID-19 diagnostics project today if she were alive. She came to Canada as an international student 20 years ago.
Economically, it is estimated that international students contribute $22 billion annually to the Canadian economy, and their presence here fuels 170,000 jobs. Canada is competing with other countries globally to attract international students. Many of them choose Canada not just because of the quality of education, but also because of its reputation as a multicultural and tolerant society.
Many people, including many higher education professionals and administrators, have been disappointed by the government's decision to exclude international students from the Canada emergency student benefit. There are about 640,000 international students in Canada, and many of them do not need the CESB because they have funding support from scholarships or other institutions, but many of them do need the CESB and are finding themselves in financial stress. These international students have multiple disadvantages to deal with compared with most Canadian students.
First, they pay tuition fees that are about three times higher than Canadian students. Second, they typically have no family here in Canada to rely on and no place they can go to stay with their family to avoid paying rent now that everything is online. Third, their family back home is finding it difficult to support them financially because many of them have also been impacted by COVID-19. Fourth, many of the kinds of jobs these students took to support their studies in Canada are the kinds of jobs that are hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Canada is a caring country, but if we fail to take care of our international student population now, it may impact our reputation in the global race to attract international students in the future. Our universities depend heavily on international students as the main driver of growth in our higher education sector in the past decade. For this reason, I recommend that the Government of Canada consider including international students, at least those who don't have tuition waivers, scholarships or other significant financial support, in the CESB program.
Thank you for your time and attention.