THUNDER BAY — The partnership that will lead to a veterinary program in Thunder Bay was a highlight of the 2023-2024 year for Lakehead University president and vice-chancellor Gillian Siddall.
The northern veterinary program is a collaboration with the Guelph University Veterinary College and it's expected to launch next year.
"All students for this program, 20 students per year, will be recruited from the north, for the north," said Siddal. "So it will address what we all know is a real gap in veterinarians in Northern Ontario."
Siddall presented the university's annual Report to the Community at a breakfast on Friday – the first time since 2019 the event has been held in-person. She highlighted some of the accolades Lakehead received last year, including its high marks in the annual Macleans University Rankings and its recognition as a top AI research institution.
Connection was a major theme of the report. "Our focus is on the relationship of the university to the community of Thunder Bay and Northwestern Ontario. How important we are to the community and how important the community is to us," said Siddall in an interview with Newswatch.
"It is an interconnected relationship and the more we work together the better we all do. So, to me, it's community is absolutely crucial to our sense of who we are in Thunder Bay."
The university's Lake Superior Living Labs Network was highlighted during the presentation, with a fireside chat with project coordinator and PhD candidate Rachel Portinga and health sciences professor Charles Levkoe.
That program connects communities and First Nations through the Lake Superior watershed and facilitates conversations and joint projects around food, water, land, climate, energy and well-being, explains Portinga.
Being able to share their work with the broader community in crucial, said Levkoe. "The research is really dependent on the relationships we're building and finding ways to learn from the people here," he said.
"We don't have the answers to some of these big challenges, like how do you solve climate change and how do you deal with inequality?
"We don't know. And the people here – the people who are living here, working here – they have ideas. So this is what we're trying to understand; what are they doing? What do they want to see?"
According to the report, 47 per cent of the 1,692 undergraduate students on the Thunder Bay campus last year were from the region and 12.4 percent of all domestic students identified as Indigenous.
"We have students coming from all over the region. We have partnerships with Indigenous institutes where students can study where they live and get a Lakehead University degree," said Siddall.
"We are recruiting Indigenous students from all over the region, and northern communities and within the city. So really our reach is quite wide within the region."
Although enrolment was up overall at the school, the 2023-2024 year continued a trend of gradually decreasing undergraduate enrolment at the Thunder Bay campus, offset by increased in enrolment in southern Ontario and graduate enrolment in general.
Increasing domestic enrolment is one way the university is working to address the damage take last year to Canada's reputation as a study destination, said Siddall. The university is also looking to diversify the countries where it recruits from, expanding into Africa, South America and Mexico, she said.
According to the report, the number of international students at Lakehead was up 9.5 per cent last year, but Siddall said international enrolment is now down 11 per cent.
"It's incredibly important for the health of the university in every way that one might interpret," said Siddall. "Of course, it's helpful for our bottom line, but international students bring so much to Lakehead University. It's such an amazing experience for students from Canada to study alongside students from all over the world.
"And we also see the impact that those students make on the city. They're working in the city, many of them choose to stay here after they graduate and bring much needed skills to the city and the region."
According to the report, 2,150 international students graduated from Lakehead between 2019 and 2023. Of those, 12 per cent have stayed to live and work in Northwestern Ontario.
