As per our last budget, one of the key investments we made as part of our overall innovation agenda, as part of our overall demonstration that we want to step up our game when it comes to building the partnership model that I talked about in my concluding remarks, was to create a better collaborative environment with our universities, and colleges, and academic institutions from coast to coast to coast. We introduced a $2-billion strategic investment fund that you alluded to and that I was fortunate to make some local announcements on in the Sault. It was really well received by the college and university, and by the aboriginal community.
The objective of that fund is not only to make these investments, but also to leverage the provinces and territories, and the institutions. The hope is that $2 billion actually turns into $4 billion when it's properly leveraged from across different levels of government across the country.
The objective of that, again, is to help create world-class facilities to really help focus on areas where we can innovate and to create an environment where Canadian students have some of the best opportunities to learn in a state-of-the-art facility where they do research. This will allow us the ability to attract some top talent from around the globe as well. That's what I was talking about in terms of the global skills strategy.
Also, the benefit with that is the short-term jobs created with infrastructure, so as you put a shovel in the ground and you make these investments, that will create short-term jobs as well. It also creates an environment to focus on areas around STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, where we can create long-term jobs as well. The objective of this initiative was to make sure that not only do we make these investments, but they will be complete by 2018.
The original allocation of the funding of this $2 billion was $494 million in the first year, $1.25 billion in the second year, and $245 million in the third year. Because we work very closely, and we have a really good working relationship with our provinces and territories, we had to adjust the program funding profile to $744 million in the first year. That includes the supplementary estimate numbers that you see here, plus what was in supplementary estimates (A). When you combine the two, that's roughly $744 million in the first year, and $995 million in the second year, and we're still maintaining our target for the third year at $245 million.
This again speaks to the fact that we have a program that's really well received by the academic institutions. We have a really good working relationship with the provinces and territories. We're getting the money out in a timely manner to create jobs. We're also strengthening our academic institutions to help Canadians who are studying domestically, and to allow us to attract some of the best and brightest, which is so critical in terms of the talent piece of our innovation agenda.