We have five programs. Two of them are national and are offered only at our school: airframe assembly and mechanical assembly. These are courses lasting less than 1,185 hours, so they are relatively short training courses.
We also offer other training courses, such as cable and circuit assembly, machining, and precision sheet metal work. These training courses consist of a maximum of 1,800 hours.
We also offer training in areas such as tooling, machining on numerically controlled machine tools, operating numerically controlled machines, industrial painting, and interior installation.
As well, we offer an important service to assist businesses with customized training, proficiency tests, and documents, among other things.
For information, we also offer training in Ontario and in Alabama and Texas, in Querétaro, Mexico, and in a number of other parts of the world.
Working with businesses, we take part in workforce development, training skilled workers and maintaining their skills in the workplace, and training to motivate and retain employees and support organizational change.
CAMAQ validates our training courses every two years, to make sure they are properly connected with the work done in plants and in neighbouring companies.
Although we do a huge amount of advertising, and we work with Aéro Montréal and CAMAQ, among others, these are the details of our enrolment for this year.
At the beginning of 2019, we started 15 groups, and in 2021, we started four. There was a 60 per cent drop in the number of groups and a 73 per cent drop in the number of enrolments. The size of the groups was also cut by 30 per cent. We were able to offer individual courses so there would be continuous entries and variable exits instead of waiting to have 20 students per group. The situation is therefore rather concerning.
You will understand that when we are not able to start groups, we have to postpone their training. This year, six groups were not started; we had to postpone training for three groups once, twice for the training of four groups, three times for the training of two groups, and four times for the training of two other groups. We push the training courses back by one month, two months, and so on. It's quite alarming.
On the subject of foreign students, enrolment has gone from about 150, or one third of our enrolments, to three enrolments. That is dramatic. For training in machining, we normally have six groups at the same time. At present, we have one group of 15 students, who started in 2018. I can tell you that there are more companies that visit the school to do recruiting than there are students to recruit. Demand in this field is huge everywhere in Quebec.
There are other obstacles that impede enrolments: border closings, particularly this year; getting the documents needed for enrolling, which is a long and very difficult process; and the permanent residence process. As well, a very large number of students head for Ontario instead of coming to Quebec. After their training, which cost nearly $27,000, many of them leave Quebec and go to Ontario to get their Canadian citizenship. This is a striking observation in the case of the last five groups that left.
What we have to understand is that foreign students come to make up the numbers in groups already in place. Because there are practically no foreign students enrolling at present, we can't start our groups, and this obstructs training at the school and in the workplace afterward.
I will conclude my presentation here.