Thank you, Michelle.
Yes, certainly. I've been in this program for 10 years, and it's come a long way. I'm very thankful for things that I have seen, such as increasing the age to under 30. That has really helped, and we appreciate that we can bring students in from our local Fleming and Trent school facilities, which are so important to me because I'm an alum. I was in the tourism program.
I love to bring in people from Fleming, but one issue we had this year was that we wanted to bring in international students to show diversity. It's something we would like to do, and Fleming is increasing in the number of international students. The program that I was in currently has only six domestic students. We hired a lovely girl from east India. We had a work permit, and we were turned down because she wasn't a Canadian citizen.
My question to you is this: On a job posting, how will I specify that candidates must be Canadian citizens, when I'm looking for diversity and when there are all these wonderful people who have come into Canada as new Canadian citizens? That's one thing that I'm stuck on, and I just don't want to have to put that on the posting.
Also, it would be good to have an answer back earlier, as you've been hearing from quite a few of the grant holders. Obviously, we are trying to hire before April 15. Our season starts in June, and, if we don't get those students in here and hired, we lose out. Most of them are keen, and they already have jobs by the time we receive confirmation on our funding. They've already been hired by other businesses. This year our successes were based on people who left those jobs and came and joined us when they saw the job posting. I don't like to hear that they were hired elsewhere and then quit and came our way, so I think it's important that you try to get us an answer back at least by April 15.
Thank you.