Statistics and surveys have indicated that our international students are very eager to stay in Canada. In the past, you're right that it has been challenging. An additional opportunity now, with the pilot, is entrepreneurial if they have a business up and running while they're in either community college or other post-secondary.... It is a great opportunity for our newcomer students to stay. One challenge I see with this is that when I first saw the statistics of how many students wanted to stay, and then I saw this new opportunity, I made a leap that our international students were heavily enrolled in business programs, so this would be a natural fit for many of them. Then I dug up some statistics from the Atlantic universities. I can provide you with a study, but between community college and university, only about 20% of them are enrolled in business programs, and of that 20%, how many are enrolled in entrepreneurial-oriented business programs as opposed to human resource management or working within large corporations?
We've created this wonderful opportunity for our international students to transition into entrepreneurship as a pathway to permanent residency. In my mind, we need to figure out how to support that transition, recognizing that these young people are not natural entrepreneurs and we want them to be entrepreneurs. There needs to be something that catches them, at some juncture in their university or other post-secondary journey, that helps them transition and understand that this is an opportunity and also recognizes the fact that they're not natural-born entrepreneurs. Most people aren't. Most people need support. By doing that we can increase capacity there.
The wonderful thing about these newcomers who are students and that demographic is that they live in a global world beyond what we can imagine. They can be such a bridge between Atlantic Canada, Canada, and the rest of the world with regard to imports and exports and synergies. Because that pathway now exists, I think there's incredible opportunity. It's very new, so we need to figure out how best to support our international students because they report that they want to stay in Canada. The international students in Atlantic Canada want to stay in Atlantic Canada.