Agriculture Committee on April 9th, 2014

[Dr. Siddika Mithani]

Yes.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

That's awesome. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Thank you, Mr. Payne.

Now we will go to Mr. Hoback for five minutes.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, witnesses, for being here.

I'm just kind of curious; you talked about $97 million over five years. How do you accommodate projects that take more than five years? Some projects might be two years, and some projects might be seven or eight years. How do you accommodate that? How do you juggle all that and make it work?

[Dr. Siddika Mithani]

Right now the Canadian Wheat Alliance is a five-year, $97-million initiative, but it's really an eleven-year initiative. The $97 million has been committed over five years in terms of contributions right now, so we hope we will continue. I was just at the meeting of the scientists a couple of days ago in Saskatoon, and the kind of complementarity is amazing when you bring Canadian scientists together, having a very similar goal to move toward, bringing all resources together, and being able to leverage the science and research.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Go ahead, Mr. Saindon.

[Gilles Saindon]

If I may, we have the same approach with our internal research and whatever research we do. Everything is done as projects with a timeline of about three or four years and all that. But I think what's important is that the scientists keep track of the general direction, and I think they build and try to design a project that will have their answers and a go or no-go type of gate point for the next step; then they will design the next project.

So they're kind of used to having these cycles. It's pretty rare that you get 20-year funding. We just look at four years, or three years, decide whether it's go or no-go; and you have to adjust and carve it a little bit, modify it, get more people involved, maybe, or go in a different direction. And biology gives you surprises too; so you think you have a straight line, but you have a big curve all of a sudden. Biology will do that to you all the time.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

I guess that leads into my next question. You've got different clusters going on, and you've got some clusters that all of a sudden require a lot of research because maybe something's come up—a new disease, a new insect—so all of a sudden you need more money for that cluster. Then you've got another cluster where everything's moving along tickety-boo, just doing general research.

Are you able to take money from one cluster and move it to another one as the need requires? Do you have that flexibility? If you have a cluster that says it's one year away from something big and asks if it can continue on for one more year with extra funding, do you have that kind of flexibility to say, yes, it's a good project, and find the funds to do that by juggling things among the clusters?

[Gilles Saindon]

In terms of the clusters, they're handled by the program branch, so they have the mechanism to make adjustments if they have to. They report annually, and I think there might be a chance to at least ask and see if there is opportunity to adjust the course of action. I think in their annual report they probably have those discussions, and there might be opportunities.

For the research we do internally, outside clusters, we do that all the time; we adjust. That's part of our project renewal process when we recycle projects; we come back and the scope may be quite different the second time around. It depends on where they are in the life cycle of the solution they're coming through.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

You have these clusters again. How do you prevent them from becoming silos, where they don't talk to each other, where they just stay in their own little world and don't share the knowledge and research that can be cross-shared in some cases? There might be new technologies that they're using to do the research and stuff like that.

[Gilles Saindon]

That's an interesting question, because I think we're seeing the opposite. They tend to be comprehensive and broad because their basis is large. You have some industries that are companies, but you also have industries that are producer organizations that are part of that cluster, and they have interesting views, and at times different views as well, or complementary views. They will bring things together.

I will give you an example from this year with the beef cluster. For the longest time, we had problems with who was going to pay for forage work and who was going to do it. It's hard to find a constituent who will come and say, “Forage is important. We’ve got to put money into it.” But the user, like the beef producer, and in dairy, as a matter of fact, both the dairy and the beef cluster did the same thing—they introduced a component in their research that was forage-related. So in fact the silos are being destroyed, not created, with these things.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

That's good to hear.

I'm good there, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Thank you very much.

Now we'll go to Mr. Lemieux, please, for five minutes.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I'd like to follow up on commercialization. In the past, I've sensed that there has not been a government focus on commercialization. It's been more on the research or perhaps the innovation. The actual commercialization of a technology has not received as much government support. Of course that's the higher-risk phase; of taking something and actually marketing it. The results of any particular research or innovation may not be marketable in that form, so sometimes there is some finessing to be done to actually get it to the farm gate to benefit farmers, or not only farmers but perhaps the agrifood processing chain, for example, which also exports to other countries.

Could you inform the committee about the commercialization aspect of the AgriInnovation program? What is the main thrust behind it? Perhaps you have an example or two that would help give committee members a concrete idea of how something is commercialized and how government might support that effort through the AIP.

[Dr. Siddika Mithani]

Let me start with some of the whole knowledge transfer aspects of the science and technology branch.

I mentioned that in 2012 we merged the PFRA, or the AESB, with the research branch. We had two branches where, in AESB, we had a specific element of what was called “knowledge transfer individuals” who actually went out and did sort of individual knowledge transfer activity. By bringing these together, we have been able to give integrated advice about some of the technologies we develop within our organization.

Now, within the science and technology branch, as we look at new projects, we're also looking at the fact that when you get to the development stage, you need a knowledge transfer element in that, so that there is a mechanism by which you know that this needs to either transfer to the provinces, to the private sector: how you are going to do that?

So within our own science and technology branch continuum, we now have a mechanism in place within the organization that says that doing science, finding research results, and then shelving them is not what we want. It needs to take us through, totally, towards the other side.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

So an example that you might be giving might be this: there is an output from the research stream, which is mostly government-led, and you're talking about transferring that information into the private sector or into the provincial government sector or into another sector that can take advantage of the commercialization.

[Dr. Siddika Mithani]

Right. For example, if you have identified a certain bioactive compound that is nutritional, you want to make sure that as you develop that particular compound, perhaps in food, you've looked at quality, and you have a mechanism to provide that information to the stakeholders that are interested. So you have a whole chain that starts from research development to tech transfer.

When you look at stream C, stream C is focused on industry commercialization, so a lot of that is not within the area of responsibility of the science and technology branch. We are generally responsible for the technology we produce, to make sure that it is taken outside.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

So is stream C, then, more focused, for example, on the output of perhaps a cluster or something like that——

[Dr. Siddika Mithani]

Absolutely.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

—where it's not necessarily government-led research; it's something that is actually probably more focused on a commercialized end product?

You're saying stream C, then, is a way to look at some of those outputs and say, actually, these three look promising, they look very commercializable, and we have some funding to help move that into commercialization so that it can be marketed and used by end users.

[Dr. Siddika Mithani]

Exactly.

[Gilles Saindon]

I would add, as an example, that the work we did was also at the end of the Growing Forward framework with the export market for food-grade soybeans to Japan. We had done some research to come up with the non-GMO food grade. It's done here in the Ottawa area, and it involves people in Prince Edward Island in the production.

So we came up with a product that was quite different in terms of feeding the market in Japan. Then there was some funding.... Again, I'm not sure I have all the words right for the terms of the program. There was a program in the department that we used and we mobilized to send a few...to scale up the thing, to produce more, and have containers. When you test-market you can't really test it with a research plot.... For instance, volume; you need volume, large volume. I think it was quite successful in testing the market and informing the next stage of science, because it's iterative.

So I think that was an example that was quite well received.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Thank you very much, Mr. Lemieux.

Now we'll go to Madam Brosseau for five minutes, please.

[Ruth Ellen Brosseau, NDP, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

I'd like to follow up on something my colleague, Ms. Raynault, touched on when she mentioned the closing of the research farm in Saint-Joseph-de-Kent. I know you can't comment on decisions the government makes, but I want to point something out. When the research farm closed, eight full-time employees, four seasonal workers and around seven students during the summer lost their jobs. Those job cuts and changes have an impact on our capacity to innovate and really support producers. Could you comment briefly on the work the research farm did and its mandate?

[Gilles Saindon]

The Saint-Joseph-de-Kent farm focused primarily on berries, tree fruit and some vegetable crops. It affects our expertise given that we work as part of a network. An experimental farm or a research centre is located in one specific spot, but our strength lies in the ability to harness the entire work. We definitely have methods to work in those areas in Kentville, Nova Scotia, where a large proportion of our people do indeed work in orchards. Many of those efforts were consolidated, and we've been able to use our critical mass in Kentville to help the people there as well. That means, then, that the impact of our research isn't limited to the immediate local area, but that it extends region-wide and often country-wide. So a great many things are happening, as is the case with vegetable crops. Very often, what's being done in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu can be fully applied to or used in New Brunswick as well. That's what a network-based approach using our critical mass can do.