ONLY ONTARIO LIBERALS ARE BUILDING FOR ONTARIO’S FUTURE

Ontario Liberals Will Graduate 11,000 More High-Tech Students Every Year

Friday, June 1, 2018

WATERLOO—Premier Kathleen Wynne was at the University of Waterloo alongside former Prime Minister Paul Martin today to highlight how no previous government has invested as much as Ontario Liberals in the new economy and the students who will power it.

Ontario Liberals are committed to graduating 10,000 more students in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math) every year. This will boost the number of STEM graduates from 40,000 to 50,000 per year and position Ontario as the number one producer of postsecondary STEM graduates per capita in North America. Ontario will also partner with the Vector Institute to graduate 1,000 applied masters students in AI-related fields per year, within five years.

By comparison, Doug Ford has no plan whatsoever to keep Ontario’s high-tech industry and post-secondary sectors strong. With a projected $40 billion in cuts over the next three years, Ford will decimate our education system and starve our high-tech sector of needed support. The NDP simply fail to appreciate what’s needed to nurture one of North America’s most vibrant technology sectors, with their suspicious attitude toward business and aversion to building strong linkages with a wide variety of private sector players.

When Premier Wynne was elected four years ago, she promised to build Ontario up for everyone and that’s exactly what Ontario Liberals are doing, with these major investments to build a highly skilled workforce and support job creation and economic growth.

Only the Ontario Liberals are building a forward-looking economy, supporting Ontario’s leadership in innovation and new technologies. Our record includes:

Investing $650-million in the Business Growth Initiative to help grow the economy and create jobs by promoting an innovation-based economy, helping small companies scale-up and modernizing regulations for businesses.

Providing free tuition to hundreds of thousands of students

Increasing high school graduation rates to an all-time high of 86.5%

The Ontario Liberal plan also expands publicly funded prescription drugs to cover one-in-two people in Ontario, makes the largest mental health care investment in Canadian history, builds a record amount of transit, boosts hospital funding, helps more people go to college or university with publicly funded tuition and lets more parents go back to work by funding preschool child care from 2 ½ to kindergarten. Ontario’s economy is growing stronger, but that growth and the care and services it funds are at risk this election.

QUOTE

“In today’s rapidly changing economy, there’s no time to look backward. Ontario Liberals are committed to supporting education, innovation and new technologies so that Ontario can continue to lead the way in jobs and growth.”

—Premier Kathleen Wynne

QUICK FACTS

Ontario already produces 40,000 STEM graduates a year, the second highest number per capita anywhere in North America.

Ontario has the second-largest Information, Communications, and Technology cluster by number of establishments on the continent.