Human Resources committee  If I could add one thing to the trends that have already been mentioned, something that we are definitely seeing is an increased interest in entrepreneurship from young people coming through our PSE institutions. We are also seeing that students who have undertaken a research internship with Mitacs are coming out of those, and sometimes very unexpectedly, with an interest in starting their own business.

Human Resources committee  Yes, that is a project we have with—and of course, now that you have me on the spot I'm blanking on the company's name, it's “something Seaplants”—

Human Resources committee  It's Acadian Seaplants, yes, thank you very much. They have a research facility based there. We sat down with them and talked about their research program and their research needs, and we put together, basically, what we call a cluster project so that they can have access to interns over a number of years—three or four years, I believe it is.

Human Resources committee  There you go.

Human Resources committee  The internships per se will all continue to be four months in duration. This is an example where we have used them, basically, like Lego blocks. They can have five in one year, or spread five out over two years, or build it all together. I'd have to get back to you with the details on what the actual research out there would be.

Human Resources committee  No, that's the way we've designed our programming. We can have projects that have a single internship, and that's it. We can have projects that have two internships, five, 10. We can really build them and stack them to meet the needs of the industry partner.

Human Resources committee  I would quickly add to that. There are institutions in communities, large and small, right across the country and there is a lot of outreach happening in some of those smaller communities. I think part of the beauty of work-integrated learning experiences is that we can take students from institutions and extend that to communities maybe where that institution is located.

Human Resources committee  I can certainly tell you about our financial model and how we cover the salaries of our interns. Our internships are based on a four-month period. We call them internship units, just for the sake of convenience, but a student can do one internship, two internships back to back, or they could come back the next year.

Human Resources committee  Are you asking specifically about the Mitacs model?

Human Resources committee  I think what distinguishes the Mitacs model is the focus on the applied research element of our placements. In many cases work-integrated learning opportunities do not necessarily have that research focus. All the research projects we support go through a peer review process so they are all validated scientifically.

Human Resources committee  That's an interesting question. Obviously the Mitacs programming is very much focused on people coming through the post-secondary education system. I think beyond those opportunities there are other government programs in place that help to support employment of young people, and maybe we need to consider work-integrated learning experiences before kids get to the point where they're at a university or a college.

Human Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, vice-chairs, and all the members of the committee, first of all for leading this study, and for including Mitacs in today's proceedings. It's a real pleasure to be here with all of my colleagues around the table. I think you will find there is a very strong alignment among all of the comments we're here to make today.