The Time is Now for Colleges and Institutes

Note: Check against delivery. This keynote address was delivered at CICan’s Connection Conference on April 30, 2024 in Calgary, AB.

Thanks for the incredible welcome. I’m so happy to be here in Calgary as the 8th steward of this vitally important national organization. 

What a whirlwind! I’ve been on the road connecting with members across the country, and I’m so impressed by the individual strengths I’ve seen. Each of your institutions has a such a unique approach to making an impact in your communities – and for Canada.

I’ve toured impressive examples of green campus infrastructure and new centres for clean energy and automotive innovation, advanced manufacturing and modular housing. I’ve heard the community-building aspirations of senior leaders. And, I’ve explored how your institutions integrate arts, technologies, and Indigenous education, which is so impressive. What’s more, I’ve seen the national impact that becomes possible when it all comes together. 

That impact story is so important for me and for our work in Ottawa.

Colleges and institutes are high value partners within your local and regional ecosystems. We are educators. We are innovators. We are job creators. We are trusted partners. We are anchor institutions in our towns and cities, provinces and regions. 

You live this daily in your communities across the country. And, our job at CICan is to make sure that Canadians and federal policy makers, funders and Parliamentarians – the people who are shaping our collective future – fundamentally recognize, value, and invest in your nation-building role.

For us, telling the story of that impact means positioning you – our members – to contribute to the long-term national agenda. To be equipped to respond to our shared challenges, nationally and globally.

I’m sure many of you know Dr. Mariana Mazzucato. She’s a European economist and a professor who popularized the concept of challenge-driven innovation in her work on the Mission Economy. Challenge-driven innovation is the idea that well-defined goals focused on solving big societal challenges can help us prioritize, coordinate and pull together resources and capacity across sectors to develop broad-based solutions.

I like this approach because it paints a picture of the strategic ways colleges and institutes can contribute to wicked societal challenges. It’s not just about the skills training, or the research, or the partnerships. It’s about what we can achieve when it all comes together in shared purpose. In other words, it’s about investing in the full capacity of colleges and institutes as ecosystem partners to respond to our country’s biggest challenges.

Linda Nazareth has written many books about the future of work and redefining leadership in our current context. She uses the phrase: “Everything is on the table.” I like to think about our big public policy questions in that way too.

These challenges – things like providing sustainable and affordable housing, preparing for and preventing large natural disasters, driving growth and industrial transformation, transitioning to clean energies, and responding to the needs of the care economy – These challenges aren’t going away. In fact, they are urgent and require laser-like focus coupled with bold ambition. 

But, if we think differently about how we work together – if we put everything on the table – each challenge becomes an opportunity for us as educators, partners, and innovators to be a bigger part of the solution.

We’re talking about “Growing Talent for a Resilient Future.” That’s the theme of our conference this year. “Growing Talent” is a critical part of building the skilled workforce we need to adapt and thrive in times of economic transformation.

I’m really glad that we’re in Calgary for my first CICan conference, because Calgary is emblematic of this transformative change. I have family in Calgary. I’ve seen the city evolve into a hotbed of innovation in areas like biotechnology, digital media, and renewable energy. I’ve also had the chance to meet most of the college and institute leaders in Alberta. And, it’s a really incredible network of visionary leaders driving transformation in their communities.

Bow Valley College’s new Centre for Entertainment Arts, for example, is expanding opportunities for the city in film, TV and animation. Lethbridge and Olds College have been conducting applied research in climate-smart agriculture for more than 30 years. Red Deer Polytechnic is innovating in advanced manufacturing, healthcare, and sustainable energy. And Northwestern Polytechnic’s National Bee Diagnostic Centre (NBDC) is the first comprehensive laboratory in Canada to offer diagnostic services that help ensure the health of all pollinator species.  

All of these are areas of research expertise and training innovation needed to address our shared challenges. Think of what we can accomplish if we pull this all together in shared purpose.

The City of Calgary’s motto is “Onward”. On their website, the city says: “We’re building Calgary’s future by making smart decisions today.” I think that’s true of CICan members too. You are city builders and nation builders.

What we do best is intentional, integrated, and impactful.

I’m sure many of you saw, not too long ago, Carolyn Rogers – who is Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada – made a major speech on Canada’s productivity emergency. She suggested that we need to focus on making sure the training and education we provide gives Canadians the skills we need to drive innovation and productivity and lower the risks of future inflation.

This is exactly what we do as a sector. Many of the big workforce challenges of the past five years fall directly in the college and institute space.

If we look back, in 2019, just after cannabis was legalized, we have a brand-new industry to think about. Within months of legalization, we saw a dozen colleges and institutes developing and implementing programs to train professionals in every aspect of the burgeoning industry. Similarly in the emerging tech sector with disruptive platform technologies like AI and genomics. Colleges and institutes offer almost 50 programs in things like AI, Big Data, data analytics, and machine learning. And this is growing exponentially. When it comes to bio-innovation, Canada’s colleges and institutes across the country are increasingly involved as key partners in enabling industrial adoption and application across sectors of our world-leading strength in genomics science.

The bio-revolution, energy transition, housing supply, healthcare for an aging population, you name it. These are the big changes and challenges we, as a country, need our educators and institutions to respond to.

Take the housing crisis for example: Canadians desperately need an answer to affordability and supply. In a very real sense, challenges like this aren’t just about the money. They’re also fundamentally about developing a workforce capable of meeting demand.

There are tens of thousands of unfilled construction jobs across the country. The industry is also facing a looming wave of retirements that will see roughly 20 percent of Canada’s construction workers retire within less than 10 years. Addressing the homebuilding labour shortage was acknowledged in the federal government’s strategy 2024 budget with initiatives to promote new construction and invest in the homebuilding workforce.

Our members are key to realizing the success of these investments. They not only train our builders but also innovate the latest tools and materials used in constructing new homes.

Skilled trades workers build and maintain homes, schools, hospitals, roads, and other vital infrastructure. In fact, it takes more than 30 different skilled trades and other occupations working on site to build a typical home. The future of the residential housing sector in Canada needs scaled up growth in designers, painters, plumbers, electricians, masons, roofers, and more.

Equally, it needs a workforce capable of adapting to housing innovation and adopting new manufacturing techniques, technologies and design to make the construction industry more productive and able to deliver supply at scale.

As Carolyn Rogers suggests, we need to think more purposefully about the connection between what we teach and what we need in our workforce. That goes for housing as well as other challenges like responding to the energy transition, the needs of the care economy and digital transformation. 

NAIT, in Edmonton is a really good example of this responsive nature. Their School of Skilled Trades already trains over 10,000 apprentices and full-time students per year. And they’ll soon be opening an Advanced Skills Centre to expand their capacity in critical industry sectors. 

It’s about recognizing an emergent need and investing the resources to meet it. At CICan, we’re working to make sure that colleges and institutes are positioned as key sectoral partners in Canada’s industrial strategy for housing – and, to secure the resources for our sector to scale and connect institutional efforts to deliver on this urgent national challenge.

The other piece of our impact as a sector is our capacity to innovate. Our federal innovation minister likes to say, today’s research is tomorrow’s economy.

I said earlier, what I love about our sector is the idea that we are intentional, integrated, impactful. So, investing in colleges and institutes means investing in our full capacity to address challenges.

Remember Linda Nazareth? “Everything is on the table.” That includes college-led applied research and innovation.

Was anyone here able to attend our National Applied Research Symposium in February? 

It was a really incredible event. As a new president, it was inspiring to see so many leaders in applied research and their partners in Ottawa sharing their visions – and their collaborative ethos – for greater scale and impact. That collaborative impact is what we need to address our big public policy questions.

I’m going to share some numbers with you. If you can, try to remember these numbers.

30%. That’s the rate at which college and institute research intensity is growing each year.  

Our sector worked on more than 8,000 applied research projects in 2021-2022 in areas like housing construction and advanced manufacturing, climate-smart agriculture and food production, and social innovation. 

6,500. That’s the number of new processes, products, prototypes and services that resulted from these projects. (80% of which were completed in less than a year). For example, researchers at the Building Efficiency Technology Access Centre at Red River College Polytechnic worked with a company called Artspan to test the efficiency of their structurally insulated panels used in modular housing construction. That project was completed in 2021. These are the results that make Canadian businesses more efficient, competitive, and productive. 

9,000. That’s the number of research partners our sector worked with in the past year.  

(62% of which are SMEs, who often do not have the capacity or resources to conduct cutting-edge research on their own). Not to mention that with college-led research, 98% of our industry partners are in Canada and they keep their intellectual property, which ensures that Canadian IP contributes to Canadian economic benefit.

27,000. That’s the number of students who contributed to applied research projects at college and institute laboratories and research centres in 2021-2022. Applied research projects give students first-hand experiences contributing to the economy in a work and learning environment. 

It’s learning that is applied, relevant, hands-on, and experiential. Not only does that help us find solutions to our housing and social challenges (and support entrepreneurs that drive the economy) – but for students, working on an applied research project gives them an inside look at their industry. It allows them to apply the skills learned in the classroom to real-world scenarios and start building their professional toolbox.

So, that impact, relevance, and reach translates into real benefits for Canadians and for the long-term sustainability of Canadian industry.

If you were at the symposium in February, you may have heard from a team of researchers at SAIT’s Centre for Innovation and Research in Unmanned Systems. Researchers there shared how they’re working with the Stoney Nakoda First Nations and Alberta Health Services to develop a scalable drone fleet that can support medical delivery and amplify drone signals in remote areas. 

It’s such a cool project because, the immediate application of a project like this means that rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities have better, more reliable access to life-saving healthcare. But with a wider lens, in a world where natural disasters are occurring more frequently and with greater intensity than before – (just last year we saw Canada’s worst-ever wildfire season (and predicting an even worse season this year) – this type of solution can be scaled and used to conduct hazard & risk assessments for emergency response, support first responders, and provide real-time intelligence for emergency decision makers. 

That’s exactly the type of strategic and interdisciplinary approach to innovation we need to address these big challenges and revolutionize our industries. Yet, this is the type of impact we’re having as a sector with only 2.9% of federal research investment.

Budget 2024 proposes to invest nearly $2 billion in research and innovation through the federal granting councils. They also proposed a new capstone research funding organization to better coordinate across the federally funded research ecosystem. Imagine what we could accomplish if we reimagine research and innovation programming to centre colleges for greater impact and to bring together our sector with other ecosystem partners to think creatively about solutions in a mission-driven research agenda for Canada.

I know that here in Calgary, the tech sector is booming. According to the City, there are more than 42,000 people working in the tech sector, including areas like health-tech, fintech, robotics, and smart infrastructure. It’s clear that, the city is really leaning into the real-world applications of these critical technologies and creating opportunities that foster long-term growth.

In the same way, colleges and institutes are working with employers and industry to develop high-quality training in these fields, providing opportunities for people to contribute to the future economy. What’s more is that our sector ensures that these opportunities are accessible.

The simple reality is that we need more workers. Right? We talked about housing earlier. We need more designers, painters, plumbers, electricians, masons, roofers – the list goes on. 

It’s important that more Canadians – and newcomers to Canada – have the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the economy. That means programming needs to be flexible, accessible, and provide quick results to improve or transform skills, particularly for groups that are traditionally underrepresented in postsecondary education.

To grow our economy, everybody needs to contribute. As institutions, what we can do is ensure that we create spaces – whether that’s in a traditional classroom, through online courses, in a mobile classroom, or using tech like virtual reality – spaces that meet talent and opportunities where they area – especially in rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities. To ensure that all the talent we see in our cities and communities is provided an opportunity to contribute to our economies. 

I grew up in a farming community in Saskatchewan, moved to Regina as a teenager and made my way through postsecondary at the University of Regina working in a local water softener factory, as a groundskeeper at Imperial Oil and leaned on the Canada student loans program. Now, I have two sons who are neurodiverse. My youngest is in grade 12 and we’re looking at his postsecondary future now.

In my own research as a parent, I came across so many examples of colleges and institutes going a step further to make postsecondary more accessible to students who are neurodiverse or who present with other learning needs and challenges.

At Algonquin College, for example, the Centre for Accessible Learning includes a Transition Support Centre for Students with Autism that helps those students navigate the transition from home life to student life. At Camosun College, the Centre for Accessible Learning (CAL) supports students who self-identify with a disability in achieving their educational goals. The centre also provides expert guidance to the college community, enabling faculty and staff to create a more accessible learning environment. Similarly, the Centre de services adaptés at the Cégep Édouard-Montpetit supports students with disabilities – whether sensory, mobility, visual, or neurological – through their studies, their integration into campus life, and development of their own autonomy.

To ensure Canada’s future growth and prosperity, and societal well-being, we will need everyone at the table. We need folks from all walks of life, with all kinds of skills, to be able to contribute to the needs of our future economy.

I don’t believe there should be any blocked pathways or closed doors for any student who think differently or with different lived experience. That’s why what we do as a college and institute sector is so very important.

The time for colleges and institutes is now. But it’s not just now. It was “then,” and it will be “tomorrow”. 

Colleges and institutes add over $190B to Canada’s economy each year. They contribute to inclusive economic growth by working with industry and community partners to offer more than 10,000 programs to learners in urban, rural, remote, and northern communities.

Investing in colleges and institutes is an investment in Canada’s future.

I come from a long line of educators; over three generations of family members have been teachers, principals, instructors, and school board superintendents. And, I’ve spent my career advancing the impact of Canada’s research, talent, and innovation ecosystem – first, at Universities Canada and later at Genome Canada. I’m proud to have landed at CICan, working now with Canada’s largest postsecondary network, and continuing a history of impact. 

A challenge-driven approach means starting with the “why”.Why do we invest?

It’s identifying a challenge and pulling together resources across sectors to develop a solution. 

For colleges and institutes, it’s an investment in skills training, industry and community partnerships, real-world research innovation, accessible education pathways and more. It’s an investment in the full capacity of our ecosystem.

My vision is one where Canada’s publicly-funded colleges and institutes are recognized as key partners in our country’s national agenda. In the things that I mentioned earlier, like providing sustainable and affordable housing, transitioning to clean energies, driving productivity and industrial transformation, and responding to the growing needs of the care economy. 

I recognize there are challenges.

Our sector is under major pressure. With declining provincial funding and increasing labour market demands. All in the context of a very public national conversation on sustainable growth in international student numbers and global competition for talent and skills. 

I’m excited about the opportunity to develop an approach to our work that is intentional, integrated, and impactful. To place our sector front and centre in a national ecosystem response, working with new partners across sectors, and finding new ways to work with the partners that already know and trust us. All with an eye to you, our members, and evolving our mission to always align with your institutional and leadership needs and priorities. 

I want all of you to be part of shaping the future of CICan. As we discussed at the President’s Leadership Network on Monday morning, we’re setting new strategic directions for 2026 and we will want your active engagement and your fresh ideas. You’ll hear more in the coming weeks and months about our strategic planning process and our plans for member consultation.

We want to define a new agenda and a new way of doing things that brings us all together in shared purpose. We want to be bold about what we can accomplish with colleges and institutes centred as core partners in a challenge-driven national agenda. We want to be a strong national voice and national association that is laser-focused on serving your needs and aspirations. 

Because I really do believe that when we scale our shared commitments at the national level, our impact is unmatched. 

We’re talking about “Growing Talent for a Resilient Future.” I mentioned earlier that the “Growing Talent” piece is a critical part of building a workforce to adapt and thrive. The “Resilient Future” piece is what we can achieve when we position our ecosystem in its full capacity as partners in impact.

Thank you.