Science and Research Committee on April 30th, 2024

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I would also like to extend my welcome to all of our witnesses and participants.

I'm going to start my questions with Ms. Francis from SFU.

Could you provide an overview of the government funding that the institute received as part of SFU and how it supports the research and engagement initiatives that you are and your colleagues are working on?

[Dr. June Francis]

One of the greatest challenges we're facing at our institute is in fact funding—grant funding, etc. We have start-up funding from Simon Fraser University, but in terms of support for the institute, much of that comes from the researchers' grants and the ways that researchers have been able to acquire grants.

Let me just say that our institute was just accepted by the senate of Simon Fraser University about two weeks ago. It's a very new institute.

In response to the fact that our racialized researchers do not feel well supported, our students do not feel well supported in being able to be supervised as students and getting access to some of the research topics they're interested in because of the funding deficit. In fact, in terms of access to research, that is one of our greatest challenges.

As you know, Black academics are under-represented in the system and under-represented in terms of getting access to and winning research grants. Part of that is that we have a whole research apparatus that has not valued those topics and does not often see value in addressing issues of race. For example, during COVID-19, when it became really important, we saw that our scientific research bodies had not spent time looking at how COVID-19 may disproportionately impact Black communities, and we know that they were overrepresented.

The short answer is that we're hoping for targeted funding to support this under-representation, and right now that is our biggest challenge.

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

Accessing funding is one of the barriers you talked about earlier in your comments.

[Dr. June Francis]

Yes, it's accessing funding, whether it's individual researchers or a network of researchers.

I'll tell you this. When other people like the U15 reach out to me as part of a research grant, it's often already fashioned. I have very little impact on leading it or on taking it in a direction that would address the real deficit in research know-how that affects Black and racialized communities in this country, so yes, it is a real challenge.

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

Thank you for that answer.

To Dr. Strickland, earlier in the study, Chad Gaffield, who is the executive officer for the U15 group of the Canadian research universities, testified to the importance of research collaborations between universities, research hospitals, colleges and polytechnics, and organizations. He said that research-intensive universities act as a catalyst in Canada's entire diversified research ecosystem.

How common are these partnerships? How often do you see them? Can you comment a little bit on this statement?

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

You have about 45 seconds.

[Dr. Donna Strickland]

Again, I don't represent the university.

I think each type of research has its own collaborations. Canada has one big, powerful laser, and all of us who work with high-intensity lasers work through that. There will be polytechnics involved with that, as well as the universities. We would probably like more colleges, but I don't think any of our colleges do that much optics yet.

I think that we do it. What we as scientists are more concerned about is that we don't do it in a big enough way to make sure that we could go global.

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

How would you benefit from that?

[Dr. Donna Strickland]

There's so much research going on in any one of our fields, and almost all science is global. When other big players are playing in certain fields and Canada does not put research dollars behind it, it's hard for us to get onto the even bigger systems out there in the world.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

That's great. Thank you.

Mr. Blanchette‑Joncas, you have five minutes.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to welcome the witnesses who are with us for the second hour of this meeting.

Dr. Strickland, I would like to welcome you and thank you for being here. I also want to congratulate you on your career as a distinguished researcher. I know you're co‑laureate of the Nobel Prize in physics for your work on the development of laser technology. So it's an honour to have you here today.

I'd like to know about the distribution of funds for research funding. We want to see Nobel laureates in academic institutions, particularly institutions that don't have a prestigious history, which we know well. You are also familiar with the institutions that are members of the famous U15 group, the 15 largest universities in Canada. How do we give a chance to a person who has potential, who has talent, who would like to do research, but who has to leave because they don't have access to a university that has the funding to do more scientific work? As you just mentioned, Canadian and Quebec researchers even go to other countries because the scientific ecosystem isn't very developed in Canada.

[Dr. Donna Strickland]

Well, all Canadian researchers go elsewhere. This is a big problem. Getting back to why we need to spend more money, this is one of the reasons. You can make twice as much money as a grad student at Princeton as you can as a grad student at any Canadian university. We're asking a lot of our young and most talented people to stay in Canada just for the sake of being in Canada. This is not a problem of a small university versus a big university; this is across the board at our universities right now. I think that's a shame.

Again, I would say that Canada actually has a much more egalitarian system than most others do, and we have our tri-council. We are looked at individually. It's not that our university gets looked at and then we get looked at underneath. I think our tri-council does a good job with the peer review, so that people have a chance to show off their research. I think Canada's problem is actually not the lack of egalitarianism so much as it is widespread low funding.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you.

We know that research funding is the crux of the problem, as you just said. Other researchers, regardless of their educational institution, will leave if they are offered better conditions elsewhere, if they have access to better infrastructure, or if they find other research teams with expertise in certain fields.

I'd like to come back to the distribution of funding. At our last meeting, Vincent Larivière, from the Université de Montréal, told us that just because a university receives more funding doesn't mean that it's more effective in its research. For example, the universities that are part of the U15 group of universities, which receive more funding, aren't going to produce more scientific research.

What do you think about investing more money in an institution that doesn't produce more scientific research results, compared to a small or medium‑sized university, which has fewer resources but manages to produce more with little money?

[Dr. Donna Strickland]

Well, again, big universities have more scientists, so they will get more money, but that doesn't mean that's more money per person. Per person, the research is probably being looked after on an individual level. Big universities may have other funds to draw on to provide more help with the research.

As I said, the tri-council agencies, I think, do a pretty good job at letting you pick which researchers across Canada are doing the best work and therefore getting funded on an individual scale. You can't look at a great big U15 institution and say that it gets a lot more money than a small school does, because of course you're not going to give a lot to a small school, but for the per capita researcher, they probably will. Of course, also, some small schools don't even have graduate programs, so they will be paying for one student in the summer or what have you, and others will have large groups.

Otherwise, it's hard for me to say.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Okay.

Dr. Strickland, I want to go back to a few facts. It's said that 80% of funding for scientific research goes to 15 major universities in Canada. As you know, there are nearly 100 universities in Canada. If we do a simple mathematical calculation, would you agree that the fact that the federal government allocates 80% of these investments in scientific research to just 15 organizations represents a real imbalance in terms of per‑student funding? The data speak for themselves.

How do we make it accessible?

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

There's time for a very brief answer, if we can get to that.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

I'll turn it over to you, Dr. Strickland.

[Dr. Donna Strickland]

I don't have an answer for that. If you're talking about tri-council money or the other funders, to me it's an issue of not having enough money to go around.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you.

I'm sorry that we're so tight on time. I have to watch it quite closely right now.

Mr. Cannings, you have five minutes.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you all for being here today.

Dr. Strickland, as Monsieur Blanchette-Joncas mentioned, it's an honour to have a Nobel Prize winner before us today.

You mentioned this proposed advisory council on science and innovation that was mentioned in the budget. You made some comments about the necessity of having scientists advise the government on the whole science and research ecosystem. According to the budget, the “Council will be made up of leaders from the academic, industry, and not-for-profit sectors”.

Can you comment further on what you think the make-up of that council should be and what its role would be in answering this and other questions that we're looking at today?

[Dr. Donna Strickland]

I would like it to be leading researchers, but again from our government labs, from our industry and from academia.

As I say, the countries that do it best are the ones that have figured out how to have all three work together and be instructive. The equivalent would be NRC in the United States, and also these joint things at universities. Different places do it differently. Other countries have these government labs that also then have academics at them and industry connections.

This is why we would like scientists—and it wouldn't cost that much, because we're usually willing to do it for free—to advise on things like how we best get industry to work together with academia, with the government, so we can move forward on the big-picture items, whether it's to be ready for the next pandemic or whether it's how to do sustainable agriculture, how to do green energy better, how to do industry productivity better, how to do any of these large things. There should be these questions, and scientists should be asked, because we do go around the world and see these other systems, and we could bring this back to Canada and say that this is a really good way that other countries have done it.

That's why we think scientists should be at the table advising the government.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

To follow up on that, you mentioned the Samsung example. Canada, it seems, has fewer giant companies like that. Maybe that's a problem of how the government has failed to nurture companies.

There's the American example. There are lots more larger companies in the United States, so they presumably have more money to put to research.

How do we get from where we are today to where you want to be in terms of what the federal government can do in allocating funds for research?

[Dr. Donna Strickland]

When I started in lasers in the 1980s, the third-largest laser company in the world was Canadian, here in Ottawa, Lumonics, and we let that go. One of the largest communications companies in the world was Nortel, and before that we said, “Oh, we have to keep the American car industry here, so we'll invest”, but we let Nortel go. Both had 90,000 employees. Somehow, because nobody else but Canada was fighting for Nortel, it wasn't worth fighting for.

We have to take these gems that are Canadian-born and bred and find ways to invest.

One of my favourite examples is Bordeaux, the region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine. It has a president who really sees the advantage, who said to me that they can't just keep living off their wine. They are going to invest in science and technology.

Not only did they build their own new graduate program for optics and put in the small start-ups with the graduate program there, but they said they were also investing billions to make sure that when these companies spin out, they get through that valley of death so that they become big companies. Now the biggest laser company is there in Bordeaux.

There is a way to do it, and we just have to foster it from somebody's lab in an academic setting all the way to the company, and make the company big. Then we say that since we helped you, we expect you to help us back, and then you make sure that you invest again in the academics and we get the whole loop going together.

That's what we need to do.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

I have 20 seconds and I have so many questions.

How can the federal government best address that from here in Ottawa?

[Dr. Donna Strickland]

Well, I know that a lot of the small high-tech companies wish that we had a small business loan like they do at SBIR, as it's called, in the United States. That could help so many. They get grants to get off the ground, but then there are also grants to make sure that they get through that valley of death until they become a larger company. We do have to make sure that every time they're lured to California, we have a budget to say, “Stay in Canada.”