Colleges and Institutes Canada

The lobby that broke universities’ monopoly on research money

For most of its history, Canada’s federal research money was earmarked almost exclusively for universities. Colleges and institutes — the institutions that train the country’s skilled workforce — were shut out of the major granting councils. Getting them in was Colleges and Institutes Canada’s signature fight, and it took decades.

The exclusion was structural: apart from limited Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council funding, colleges could not access the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) or its sister councils. That did not stop the applied research itself — CICan’s flagship COLLEGE CANADA publication was already documenting college-industry research partnerships in 1986–87, and a 1988 CICan survey drew 286 research proposals with 88 percent of respondents wanting to pursue them.

The breakthroughs came in sequence. In April 1997 the Canada Foundation for Innovation launched with $800 million and a five-year mandate — and “as a direct result of our active and committed advocacy, colleges and institutes were included as eligible institutions for the first time.” In the 2002–03 fiscal year a pilot project with NSERC let colleges apply directly for research grants for the first time. Then in 2008 the Tri-Council College and Community Innovation (CCI) Program was formed, and the number of institutions eligible for NSERC funding rose from 13 in 2005–06 to 108 in 2014–15. By 2019–20, CICan members had entered more than 8,000 partnerships producing over 5,500 prototypes, products, processes and services.

From a 1970 Ottawa vote to the national voice

The association was born of the post-war community college boom: with skilled-worker demand surging after the Second World War, the college system expanded dramatically from the 1950s into the early 1970s while the university system was already established. A late-1960s national survey found 91 percent of respondents favored a national association; representatives gathered in Ottawa in November 1970 and voted to create the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, with by-laws formally approved at a Constitution Conference in October 1972.

The secretariat started in Montreal — briefly at Cégep du Vieux Montréal, then Vanier College — moved to Centennial College in Toronto in 1973, went off-campus to commercial space in 1979, and finally relocated to Ottawa in 1992, “the physical representation of our commitment to be a national vocal advocate” to federal decision-makers. Early money came from the American Kellogg Foundation’s 1976 operating grant, which launched the Canadian Studies Office, an international program and a publication house; the first federal funding followed in 1978.

The international footprint grew fast: by 1983 the association was delivering projects in 40 countries across Africa, Asia and the Americas, and between 1991 and 2007 it worked with members on 631 projects with 734 overseas partners in 105 countries. Later funding diversified through the Asian Development Bank and World Bank (from 1984 — the first ADB project upgraded teachers’ skills in Thailand), a Corporate Alliance program from 2001 (TD Bank, RBC, Cisco, Dell among the partners), and foundation partnerships including the Mastercard Foundation’s Young Africa Works program, which aims to help 30 million young Africans find dignified work by 2030.

The fights in between

CICan’s advocacy was not only about research money. When the 1985 Canadian Jobs Strategy signaled Ottawa’s intent to redirect training funds from colleges into privatized industry, the association took members’ concerns to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Employment and Immigration in a long 1987 session — and helped improve the strategy’s language. On copyright, it fought cost increases from the 1988 Copyright Act, petitioned successfully on the 2010 Copyright Modernization Act, testified at the Supreme Court of Canada in 2012 for a landslide win on accessibility and instructional use, and argued again in the 2021 York v. Access Copyright case for another favorable ruling.

Its international-student work also shaped federal policy: CICan helped pilot the Student Partnership Program in India, which became permanent as the Student Direct Stream for study permits — easing visa assessment burdens while positioning Canada as a destination of choice. International enrolment at colleges surged past 120,000 learners in 2018–19, nearly double the 2015–16 figure.

That international footprint continues. In 2025 the Government of Canada committed $5 million over five years for CICan to strengthen environment-related academic programs in Tunisia, partnering with Tunisian higher institutes of applied sciences and technology to prepare graduates for the ecological transition in regions hardest hit by climate change. Academica Group

In 2016 the association developed Canada’s first social financing project: the Essential Skills Social Finance project, delivering essential-skills training to unemployed adult Canadians through four college partners — the first time social impact bonds were used nationally in the country, with investors and participants reporting positive outcomes.

Today more than 95 percent of Canadians live within 50 kilometres of a college or institute, and over 86 percent of Indigenous peoples do — a proximity CICan has leveraged in decades of Indigenous education advocacy, from a 1992 task group and a brief to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples to its Indigenous Education Protocol.

What this profile does not claim

• Current membership counts, annual budgets, or the name of the current president; none were verified from a fully-read source.
• That CICan’s 2024 concerns about international student permit reforms changed federal policy; the advocacy page read in full does not cover that episode.
• Any position on whether the college or university model produces better outcomes; the profile reports CICan’s advocacy record, not an evaluation of it.