Thank you very much.
I'm Dr. Janet Morrison, and for the past five years, I've served as the president and vice-chancellor of Sheridan College. Joining me today is my colleague Rajan Sandhu, Sheridan's vice-president of strategy and general counsel. He and I have travelled together to inform our leadership lens on international enrolment. Together, we thank you for inviting us to provide a deputation on this really important topic.
Let me start by underscoring my view that the integrity of international enrolment at the post-secondary level in Canada demands your urgent attention. I'm out in the community all the time, and the stories I hear from learners, consistent with those you've heard today, can be heartbreaking.
I'm equally concerned about the economic and social impacts reverberating across the communities that Sheridan and I, by extension, serve. I am deeply troubled by the potential impact that a failure to act could have on “brand Canada” around the world. In that context, I want to share what Sheridan is doing to improve the international student experience through the Brampton charter, which was co-created with the City of Brampton.
To start, as a leader in the post-secondary system and public system and as a champion of education, I don't frankly care where a student is enrolled or to whom they're paying tuition. Rather, my preoccupation is with ensuring that every international student receives a quality education and the services they need to be successful. This has to include transparency around costs, graduate and employment outcomes, and pathways to immigration. Our collective integrity rests on those imperatives, and they need to happen across every institution, regardless of whether it's public, private or a public-private partnership.
Sheridan leaders, including Rajan and I, for example, travel regularly to countries of origin to do in-person, predeparture orientations that are purposely designed to be transparent and frank. In between those sessions, Sheridan engages a small circle of trusted staff and partners in-country to ensure that students are fully briefed on the experience, the costs and the outcomes.
More broadly, Sheridan's response to the integrity challenge is the Brampton charter, which was ideated and crystallized through a collective impact model. I believe that this experience and leadership can support the work of this committee, can be adopted and scaled for deployment in other communities across Canada and has the potential to make Canada a best-practice model for attracting international talent.
As some of you will know, Sheridan is one of 24 publicly assisted colleges in Ontario. We have over 31,000 full-time and part-time students enrolled across a variety of programs. We have campuses in some of Canada's fastest-growing cities: Oakville, Mississauga, Toronto and Brampton. Our campus in Brampton attracts just over 11,000 learners, approximately 40% of whom are registered as international students, largely from India. These students are smart and courageous, and they work incredibly hard. Post-graduation, they make significant economic and social contributions, locally and nationally.
We've called Brampton home for 55 years. The city, however, is currently home to 70 private career colleges, 10 private-public partnership campuses—if we include those in neighbouring Mississauga—and thousands of international students who live in Brampton but attend school elsewhere, including as far away as rural and northern Ontario and Quebec. North Peel is home to a very significant number of post-secondary learners from outside Canada, a reality that was further fuelled during the pandemic by remote online learning.
For years, we've been hearing concerns from community partners about issues like housing and food insecurity, negative mental health, violence, employment exploitation and human trafficking. I can tell you that none of the most egregious circumstances recounted by media involved our students, but in our role as an anchor institution, Sheridan was compelled to step up in the fall of 2021 to embark on this collective impact journey to address the pressing concerns.
In collaboration with the city, we co-convened a group of community leaders to tackle those challenges. This round table was co-chaired by the chief of Brampton Fire and Emergency Services and the CEO of Indus Community Services, a local service agency. It included leaders from the college, from public health, from the local hospital, from the board of trade, from faith and cultural groups and from students who brought their lived experiences to the table. They met five times in six months and engaged all kinds of stakeholders.
The work yielded 150 ideas and informed the organization of a public summit where those ideas were more fully explored. It was a two-day event hosted at our Davis campus. There were 250 delegates in person and 600 plus who attended online. I want to give a special thank you to one of our local MPs, MP Ali, a member of this committee, for his attendance, and also a vote of thanks to our local MPs, MP Sidhu and MP Sahota.
Participants in the summit represented all levels of government, public and private post-secondary institutions, social services, the police and local businesses—