I believe they were. This was colloquially referred to as the “Nortel program”. It resulted from a tremendous amount of pressure exerted on the government by Nortel in the late 1990s when they were expanding rapidly. I've heard some people express the view that it was a waste, because all of those people came on stream just as the tech collapse occurred in 2001 and 2002.
When you look at the long term, at the current shortages and the current demand that we're still facing and the rapid growth of the tech economy globally over the past 20 years, all of those graduates were absorbed into the economy and we're in a comparable position today.