Status of Women committee  Madam Chair, my only comment is that hands-on experience is something we need to build.

Status of Women committee  I don't know of any specific research, but again, this has been spoken about at this table earlier. Depending on your socio-economic level, you have more or less access to those people who can in fact be the influences. Someone at the higher economic level can have access to people, neighbours, and family who are in fact engineers, lawyers, or whatever.

Status of Women committee  Really, very little. We have not actually gone to the Council of Ministers of Education. Our provincial bodies have spoken with provincial ministries of education. What progress has there been? I would say it's been minimal, if any. This is something that I think should have more emphasis, which it hasn't had.

Status of Women committee  What is happening is that the embryo of that is there, but we need to accelerate it. We need to make sure that what is already in place is in fact implemented fully, and it is not at the moment.

Status of Women committee  I wonder if I might dive in here. The agreement on internal trade, in chapter seven, now says that if a credential is awarded in one province, it must be recognized in another. That's law in Canada. However, the implementation of that is going very slowly. The other component that ties in with what Kim has been speaking about is the whole idea of foreign credential recognition and the framework to ensure that an individual has his or her credentials recognized very quickly, specifically within a year of arrival in Canada, or that a program is put together to allow that individual to in fact attain the credential that is needed in Canada based on Canadian prerequisites.

Status of Women committee  I think it's a question of a focus. If you take the average grade school student, average high school student, that individual can name you the planets in their orbits in the right order in the solar system and around the sun. That's science. That same individual cannot tell you how a telephone works.

Status of Women committee  If we speak about the GoTechgirl campaign, there are about 20-odd mentors who can be reached through Facebook by any young woman. That allows any young woman to ask, what is it like to be a biotechnician? They can pose that question to a biotechnologist via Facebook. We need much more capacity to provide that type of mentoring activity to young women.

Status of Women committee  I find myself supporting Wendy all the time, and that's good. Very often an individual making a decision about a career path in technology--let's take engineers--who decides to become a resource engineer working within the resource industry will suddenly find that the resource industry is absolutely dead.

Status of Women committee  If I may, Madam Chair, I'll support and build up the theme that Wendy just put forward, and that is the theme of influencers. With the rise of such television programs as CSI, where do you think a majority of applications for community college programs are? People have oversubscribed in a major way to those crime scene types of programs that are being offered within the community colleges system.

Status of Women committee  Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, ladies and gentlemen, as we have been introduced, I am Yaroslaw Zajac, the executive director of the Canadian Council of Technicians and Technologists. Beside me is Mr. Isidore LeBlond, who is the manager of program development at the Canadian council.