Thanks, Denise.
I'd like to punctuate Denise's comments about the capacity that institutions can bring to help with rural immigration efforts with three different examples that I've been involved in over the past 20 years.
The first goes back to 2003-04, when I had the privilege of being involved in building an immigration strategy for Cape Breton Island. At that time, one of the members of our association, Cape Breton University, was deliberately starting to increase the number of international students they were recruiting. That number has grown dramatically over the past several years and now represents more than half of the students who attend that institution.
As a result, in 2019, the population of the Cape Breton regional municipality increased for the first time in over 50 years. That's my entire lifetime. It's the first time they'd seen a population increase, and it was directly attributable to the growth in the number of international students at that particular institution.
The second example comes from 2006, when I happened to be the president at a college in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. Many small and medium-sized enterprises began recruiting internationally because of labour shortages there, but there was no settlement agency in the southwest part of the province. The college stepped up and founded the settlement agency, operated it for the first few years to incubate it and then put it out on its own. I think this helps to illustrate Denise's point about how the distributed nature and reach of colleges can be used to build community capacity to support immigration.
Finally, here in Brandon, the college I'm at now has grown from fewer than 30 international students in 2013 to over 600 in 2019-20. Our strategy has been to align with provincial population and labour market goals, as most of the students who come to our institution are keen to eventually become citizens.
As one example, in the agriculture field, where one in five jobs in Manitoba is expected to go unfilled, we've partnered with food processors to develop a program whereby international students can come here to train and do paid work placements, which helps to offset their tuition costs and connects them with employers. This program is now in its third intake, and it has generated significant interest from families who already work at many of the food processors in the area. We know that if you can get folks to come through the program who already have family to live with in Brandon, the likelihood that they're going to settle there for the long term will be that much greater. The program has generated over 150 inquiries from family members about how they can get their family to come through it.
I note, which is important for the Government of Canada, that some of these projects would not have been possible without support for infrastructure, facilities and equipment through folks at regional development agencies. Thinking about how colleges can be unlocked to help with these goals requires that we think about this broadly in terms of the different vehicles that the Government of Canada can bring to bear on such situations.
Thank you.