Thank you, Mr. Chair. Like Ken, we very much appreciate the opportunity to speak to the panel today.
I'm speaking on behalf of our organization, SIAST--the acronym more commonly used around here. I'm privileged to serve as the president of a four-campus institution. We have campuses in the beautiful Saskatchewan cities of Prince Albert, Saskatoon, Moose Jaw, and Regina. We serve about 12,000 full-time students, almost 30,000 individual course registrations, and we're very proud that we graduate nearly 4,000 students each year.
I hope our brief builds upon the submission you received from ACCC, the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, back in April, entitled Making it Work. I know you can count on SIAST--in fact, as a board member of ACCC, you can count on all of us in the college and institute sector--to work with you on Canada's science and technology plan. We're very proud of our work. Let me just begin with a few brief points that are built upon in our report, beginning perhaps with links to industry.
At our institute we're very proud that we have over 700 people who serve on our industry advisory committees. That gives us a very strong connection to local and regional industry and also some national connections.
I'm proud that we recently had a meeting with three of the leading potash producers in our province--PCS, Mosiac, and Agrium. They were talking not only about their human resource needs but also about their applied research and technology needs. That's what I want the panel to hear, that you can count on the institute and colleges in our province. So the first is industry links.
I hope the panel might also consider the role that colleges and institutes play in applied science. We really are the organization--our faculty and staff--that can take good bench research to the next level. We do a lot of testing of materials, testing of protocols.
We hope the panel might consider direct support to the colleges and institutes. We're pleased to see some changes, for example, with CFI eligibility that have opened the doors to institutes, but perhaps some targeted funding to us would be very helpful in these applied research projects.
The third point that I'd like to build on is really based upon support for students. The ACCC submission highlighted the need for support for internships and co-op students in many areas. Again, we are very proud, and I've been told by Ken's colleagues that almost 40% of the staff at Innovation Place are graduates of technical institutes--the technologists, the lab assistants. These are the foundational staff that really make applied research and general research work. We hope the panel might consider investment in internships and some unique support for co-op kinds of activities.
Finally, as I noted in the document on science, we're really proud of some of the partnerships we've built. We're pleased with the partnerships we have in our provincial institutions, with Dr. Florizone and his colleagues. We have a number of “two plus two” partnerships. But I submit that we've only scratched the surface on those kinds of activities. What I mean by two plus two is building from a technology program into degree programs so that students can explore all sorts of options.
We're pleased with the relationship in our province, but also proud that a number of institutions from outside of Saskatchewan have looked to SIAST for partnerships. We have a number of agreements with Alberta and British Columbia students.
As a subset of that, if I can just build on partnerships, I want the panel to know how proud we are of the partnerships with aboriginal institutions and organizations in the province of Saskatchewan. While the panel is focused on science and applied research, of course, I think we have to, in western Canada, give due consideration to opportunities and the science needs of aboriginal students.
My final comments are that we are delighted that nearly 20% of our student population--with particular emphasis on our Prince Albert Woodland campus, with almost 40% of our students--are of aboriginal ancestry. But this is another area that I urge the panel to build on.
With that handful of comments, other details are in the submission, and I look forward to questions. Thank you.