Thank you, Madam Chair.
My name is John Hepburn and I am currently in Vancouver. Since it will soon be evening here, I will say good evening to everyone. Given that my French leaves a bit to be desired, I'm going to speak in English.
The chair of this committee knows us very well, but many of you probably don't know us. Somebody was telling me in a recent meeting that Mitacs is Canada's largest not-for-profit. That's close. We're somewhere behind World Vision Canada, but we're certainly many times larger than most of the not-for-profits, health charities and the like that support innovation in this country.
I'm not here to beg for money from the federal government. The federal government is very generously supporting us, with two long-term funding agreements for just under $1 billion. That money is matched by all 10 provinces plus Yukon territory, plus industry support.
What do we do with all this money? We provide work-integrated learning opportunities based on innovation partnerships between post-secondary institutions, industry and not-for-profits, and also we have expanded to include municipalities and hospitals. Our goal and our stated purpose are to increase innovation and prosperity in this country, to increase social innovation, basically for the good of all Canadian.
Our activity is 20% in international programs. We bring very talented students, like Mr. Basiri, to Canada under our Globalink programs. Success for us is to have a senior undergraduate student arrive from someplace that's not Canada to spend a stage in a Canadian university before they make their decisions about graduate school. The goal is to convince them to come to a great Canadian university for their Ph.D., at which point they can get a Mitacs internship—we provide about 20,000 of these per year—to work on a joint research project between Canadian industry and a Canadian university. That student is then eligible for support through our e-accelerate program to start a company. We have examples of students who have done exactly that.
How do we retain students? The answer is that we first of all take advantage of our fabulous universities, which attract talent from around the world. We work with them to provide them with opportunities to work, between the university and industry. We do this at Mitacs. I won't say most, but almost half of the students we deal with have come to Canada to study Ph.D.s as international students. Of these students who get Mitacs internships, 75% remain in Canada after their degree—master's, Ph.D. or post-doc—to work and apply their talents to the benefit of Canadians, and obviously to their own benefit. This retention rate is 30% higher than the retention rate for students who come as international students and don't do a Mitacs internship.
We have an agreement with the Government of Manitoba that anybody who does a Mitacs internship is automatically registered in the provincial nominee program for fast track to permanent residency. We're talking with other provinces about doing the same thing.
However, what I'd like to say is that, in addition to supporting organizations like Mitacs, one thing the federal government can do—and I know that innovation is a big part of the current agenda—is support innovation in this country. Talented students are not going to come and stay in Canada unless they have great jobs to go to post-graduation, unless they can start their own companies, like Mr. Basiri, or unless they can work for existing companies. That's why students go to Stanford. Let's not fool ourselves: Stanford is a great university, but they go there because they know they are going to get a fantastic job when they graduate. That's critical.
One way the government can do this, and I think I'm running out of time.... I was just in Edmonton, Alberta, for an announcement of a partnership between us and AltaML, which is an artificial intelligence company, and the Government of Alberta, which is going to establish something called GovLab.AI, actually using a Canadian company to solve government problems using machine learning.
If they are successful, these problem-solving solutions, which are intended—their first project will be predicting wildfires, for example, something we care about a lot in British Columbia.... They are also going to work with health data to provide more efficient health care for Albertans. If they develop these solutions, and they will, because AltaML is a very successful, rapidly growing company that we've been working with for years—well, they're not that old, it's been for four years—they can commercialize these products. They can build their company and, using the government procurement process, they can become a successful company which will then employ loads of students and attract more students.
Thank you very much.