TimminsToday received the following letter from Fred Gibbons, Northern College's president and CEO, supporting 'strategic investments' from government that would help it catch up with deferred maintenance and $19 million in capital spending:
*************************
The Federal government is poised to announce a major infrastructure program intended to stimulate our stagnant economy.
One sector the government needs to pay particular attention to through strategic infrastructure investments is post-secondary education.
Such investment is critical to supporting Canada’s skills development and innovation agenda.
This is true for Canada’s colleges and institutes; it is particularly true for Northern College who is mandated to provide hands-on skills training and experiential learning, but is finding it harder to do so with its existing aging facilities and equipment.
Aging facilities are a growing concern for the communities served by colleges and institutes where almost half of existing infrastructure currently exceeds its 40-year life cycle.
The data makes for gloomy reading. A recent nation-wide survey by Colleges and Institutes Canada found that 63 percent of existing college infrastructure requires replacement or significant maintenance.
There are currently 1200 deferred maintenance projects requiring funding at colleges and institutes across the country, estimated at a cost of $1.7 Billion.
At Northern College’s four campuses deferred maintenance costs alone exceed $47M, just to return our facilities to an acceptable maintenance standard that incorporates more energy-efficiency measures and adoption of green technologies that will contribute to reducing our environmental footprint.
Increasingly, money that should be going into classroom instruction, development of new programs and service supports to help with successful student outcomes are being diverted into maintaining our facilities.
In addition to large deferred maintenance expenditures, as a college, Northern has three new construction projects that it wishes to proceed with worth an estimated $19M.
It is critical that our current facilities be well maintained, but equally important, investments are needed to build the innovative new learning and teaching areas that will ensure current and future students are provided with a leading-edge learning environment.
Strategic investments, such as the 2009 Federal Knowledge Infrastructure Program that enabled infrastructure enhancement at post-secondary institutions and which resulted in the construction of the Northern College Centre of Excellence for Trades and Technology, are urgently needed now to address deferred maintenance and new infrastructure needs.
In turn, this will contribute to meeting the skills development and innovation needs of employers and communities across the country.
Locally, it will provide our students and future students with the same competitive advantage that students receive elsewhere in the province and throughout the country, without having to leave the north.
Youth retention, capacity building, building a sustainable northern economy and creating health communities all share a common denominator - a federal infrastructure investment into colleges and institutes.
Fred Gibbons, President & CEO
Northern College
*************************
