Thank you.
Just to put the numbers on this, in terms of the past five years, Canadian university enrollment has increased from about 850,000 to over a million. During the same time period, enrollment in math and science and computer information sciences has gone down from over 43,500 to under 41,000. So while people are enrolling more in university, these core skills are going down.
If you look at IBM or Microsoft or our industry, for instance, we have, as I mentioned, 3,000 software developers. These are the people who go on to get their PhDs, who can feed our lab. And if we want to grow that capability, we need to have that capability here to grow. That's one stream, the deep technology skills to feed our labs, to feed the research and development we want to do.
On the other side of the coin, something that Bernard mentioned are the multi-faceted skills, people who have this core technology base but also understand business, legal issues, and social sciences. These are the people who are going to be able to engage clients to comprehend their problem, understand how technology and industry expertise can be applied to solve problems, then devise the strategy, lead a team to execute the strategy, and solve the client's problem. So this is the multi-faceted skill set that has a technology root but also the business and legal complements that we need to develop. That's the broad base of the new fundamental skill set that I think we need in this economy. So there's the deep technology skills, and then there's the multi-faceted skills that we need to create.