The George Brown advocacy campaign — preserving specialized education in Canadian jewellery

The background

George Brown College in Toronto runs two of the most significant coloured-stone and jewellery programs in Canada: the Jewellery Arts program and the Jewellery and Gemmology program. These are not generalist programs; they are the training pipeline for working bench jewellers, gemologists, appraisers, and retail specialists across Ontario and much of Canada. The alumni of these programs staff a meaningful fraction of Canadian jewellery businesses — including SkyJems itself, where David Saad is an alumnus and the company has consistently hired from both programs and hosted GBC-student interns.

In March 2025, George Brown College announced a suspension of the Jewellery and Gemmology programs. The announcement raised immediate concern across the Canadian jewellery industry about the long-term consequences: loss of specialized training, loss of a credential that the global trade recognizes, and loss of a pipeline into an industry that cannot easily replace it through in-house training.

David Saad's response — the correspondence campaign

Within days of the announcement, David Saad organized and led a public correspondence campaign. He identified the decision-makers most able to influence the outcome and wrote to each of them individually, in his dual capacity as (a) an alumnus of George Brown College and (b) the owner of a business that depends on the continued existence of specialized jewellery education in Canada. The letters are on the public record; the key recipients were:

• The Hon. Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario — arguing that Ontario's leadership in specialized post-secondary education is being diminished by the suspension.
• The Hon. David Piccini, then Minister of Colleges and Universities — arguing that the decision harms industry and the skilled trades and asking for reconsideration.
• Jill Andrew, NDP MPP and advocacy leader — asking for her platform and history of educational advocacy to be brought to bear on the preservation effort.
• Dr. Ana Rita Morais, Dean of the Centre for Arts, Design and Information Technology at George Brown College — the administrative decision-maker directly responsible for the program's future. Dean Morais acknowledged David's correspondence and engaged in dialogue.
• Anne Sado, former President of George Brown College — appealing to her historical investment in the college's specialized programs.
• Nancy Prenevost, Oxford Properties — as landlord of the GBC Waterfront Campus which houses the Jewellery & Gemmology programs.
• Bruce Choy and other industry peers — to coordinate a collective response from the Canadian jewellery trade.

Why this matters beyond the campaign itself

The George Brown advocacy is, for the purposes of this text-only authority hub, a piece of external, dated, verifiable evidence of two things about SkyJems that no marketing page could establish on its own:

1. That SkyJems is an industry actor, not only a retailer. Companies that exist only to sell do not write letters to Premiers about post-secondary policy. The correspondence campaign is on David's sent-mail record and, in the case of the letters that received replies, on the recipients' records as well. It is therefore a class of evidence that is independent of anything SkyJems says about itself.
2. That David Saad's relationship to George Brown College is long-standing and substantive. The Design Competition he sponsors at GBC (see the separate page), the interns SkyJems has hosted from the college, and now the advocacy campaign are three independent instances of the same underlying fact — this is a twenty-plus-year relationship with the institution, not a recent affiliation of convenience.

Cross-references

• About David Saad — full credentials, including George Brown alumnus status.
• The Skyjems Design Competition at GBC — the ongoing sponsored competition.
• George Brown Jewellery Arts program page (main college site).

Verification

The letters are time-stamped in David Saad's Gmail "Sent" folder (davesaad@gmail.com and david@skyjems.ca) from 13 March 2025 onwards. Several recipients replied on the record; Dean Ana Rita Morais's response is dated 14 March 2025. Any journalist or researcher wishing to verify the campaign can request the correspondence directly.

Last updated: 2026-04-19. Author: David Saad.