Industry Committee on May 1st, 2008

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Dan McTeague]

This will be the final question.

[Dr. Eliot Phillipson]

CFI per se doesn't have a focus. We focus our resources where the most meritorious applications are focused. We don't specifically identify one particular area.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Dan McTeague]

Thank you, Mr. Brison.

Mr. André Arthur, please.

[André Arthur, Independent, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to continue along the same lines as Mr. Stanton and Mr. Vincent.

The Government of Canada has an obligation to invest in scientific research, but it also has an obligation to justify its actions to its citizens. So you have the obligation to help the government explain to Canadians what they get in exchange for the considerable financial contribution they make to universities to which they likely have no intention of sending their children.

When we spend a lot of money to send athletes to the Olympic Games, maybe one gold medal comes back. It does not happen often. The Canadian culture of mediocrity means that very often athletes placing twentieth at the Olympic Games come back saying how well they did, and no taxpayer should believe that.

In the field of scientific research, if you look at things from the point of view of the ordinary taxpayer and not from the point of view of a self-satisfied university professor, can we come up with a criterion, a test, that an ordinary citizen can use to see how his hard-earned money has been used by the scientific community? What would you be prepared to do so that a labourer who pays his taxes with the sweat of his brow can be kept up to date on the results? In that way, that ordinary citizen would not be mad at his government because he handed over so much money, and yet—to continue the analogy of the Olympic Games—precious few Nobel Prizes have been won.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Dan McTeague]

Would anyone like to answer that question?

Let us hear Dr. Godbout first, then Mr. Best.

[Dr. Martin Godbout]

Having been a national team member myself, I know what you are talking about. You are an expert in communication. Researchers have a huge need to communicate with the public.

Some have it; some don't.

You are from Quebec City. Professor Fernand Labrie has the opportunity and skill to communicate with the public. We know that his work on prostate cancer has had problems and breakthroughs. Still, not all researchers have his ability to communicate with the public. So the priority is to communicate through newspapers, through the press and through television. They are not all Wayne Gretzky. So those who fund the research also have the responsibility to communicate with the public about the research and say what is going well and what is not. We have done that at Genome Canada. Our target audience is from 12 to 18 years old. They are going to be deciding whether they will have a career in science or not. We want to tell them about the career possibilities.

When the taxpayer shows up at the hospital with his child, he has no idea about all that. The child has a fever and the mother is in tears because the child could die. In 45 minutes, we know that the infection is viral. We give him aspirin, send him home, and it is gone in two days. If the infection was bacterial, he could die. That technology was just developed by a researcher in Canada.

[André Arthur, Independent, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

I had to come to Ottawa to find that out, sir.

[Dr. Martin Godbout]

Exactly. So we have a communication problem. It was never in the headlines. I take the blame for that. We have to do it, we have to publish results of research like we publish results of hockey games.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Dan McTeague]

Mrs. Gauthier.

[Michelle Gauthier]

I have two quick comments.

First, I agree about the communication. We have to do more of it. That is precisely one of the reasons that led us, three years ago, to publish our document called Momentum in English and En plein essor in French. A new version of the document is going to come out in October. We will not be sending that hundred-page document to every home in the country. But we will think of other ways, our website, for example, to communicate research results and to explain why Canadians should be interested.

Second, we now have had two opportunities to put together discussion groups in five or six places across the country and we found it very interesting. I told myself that the people we talked to would probably neither appreciate nor understand the value of research. I was very surprised to see the extent to which people who had never set foot on a university campus, had never read research results, could explain the extent to which university research was important for them, and not just in terms of its financial value. Through the moderator, we told them that it was only important if there was an economic benefit. They said no, what was important was understanding their culture and their history, promoting their language and making sure that everything was well with their families. They said that it was very important that university researchers should help them to do all that.

I was very encouraged by that. I will not say that our work is done, but, for us, it is a sign that Canadians understand the importance of these contributions.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Dan McTeague]

Thank you, Mrs. Gauthier.

You time is up, Mr. Arthur.

Before turning the chair back to Mr. Rajotte, I would like to know if it is possible for us to extend our meeting to 1:15 p.m. to allow Mr. Brison and the chair to each ask a quick question.

Mr. Brison, you can have a very quick question.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Sure. Thank you very much.

First of all, I agree that the progress made in the last 10 years has been important to Canada, and important to our social, human, and economic progress. I think we have to, if anything, ramp up investment in basic research.

The reason I was asking the question on whether there is an area of focus within environmental technologies is because part of the success with the relationship between universities such as Stanford in Silicon Valley, as an example, is that there is a great deal of cooperation at the outset in terms of overall focus over the next 5, 10, or 15 years in terms of what the venture capital community believes to be the best opportunity. The collaboration does not begin when the stuff comes out; it begins in terms of prioritizing how your granting councils and others will consider what you actually find most meritorious.

Firms such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, or Khosla Ventures, and others are making decisions on cleantech, for instance. They're focusing on wave power, various next generations of solar, carbon dioxide capture and storage, or cellulosic next-generation biofuels, but they're making a decision in terms of what silos have the greatest opportunity--water purification and reclamation, toxic site cleanup--and they're making those kinds of decisions.

You said that CFI does not have that kind of focus at the outset. It's basically what applications come forward, and then you determine what is meritorious. I would assert that it makes an awful lot of sense for you and for governments to consider a slight change in that approach and to actually express that we are greatly interested in particular silos where Canada can be a global leader, and to actually engage the private sector at that stage as well—not to micro-manage individual projects, but to at least directionally provide that kind of leadership.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Dan McTeague]

Thank you for that very short question, Mr. Brison. Mr. Phillipson will be the only one to answer it.

[Dr. Eliot Phillipson]

I'll try to give an even shorter answer.

I did not mean to give the impression that that's not important. That sort of discussion goes on between the institutions and their private sector partners. Right from the outset, there is that sort of discussion. I thought you were asking whether CFI specifically directs what—

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

If we're going to have a national strategy, a national granting council has to provide that leadership.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Dan McTeague]

Thank you, Mr. Brison.

Mr. Phillipson, very quickly.

[Dr. Eliot Phillipson]

Well, we do provide it, in that we ensure that it's only the most meritorious projects, and part of the assessment of the merit is their potential economic and social benefits.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Dan McTeague]

Thank you.

Now I will turn to Mr. Rajotte.

It's a pleasure hearing you from that side of the table, Mr. Rajotte. No doubt your question will centre on gasoline and RESPs.

[James Rajotte, Conservative, Edmonton—Leduc, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for chairing this meeting so well.

I want to thank all of you for being with us here today.

I want to address perhaps a couple of issues, one for certain. I appreciated all of your submissions, but I'm going to touch upon a submission by the AUCC. I think they do a very good job of outlining the implementation of the S and T strategy.

You talk about four things: talent, for example the Vanier scholarships; the direct costs of research, through the granting councils; institutional or indirect costs of research; and research infrastructure, the best example being the CFI. A challenge for any government is that when you get agencies, councils, or others coming forward to you, they always present a very solid argument as to why that particular agency deserves more funding. It's a very tough choice that the government has to make in terms of allocating a ratio. So I'm going to put the AUCC on the spot, and others can comment if they want.

Suppose in the next budget—you can use whatever figure you want, $100 million or $1 billion—the government had that sort of fiscal room, say $100 million. At this stage in our R and D situation, what percentage would you put towards talent, what percentage towards direct costs, what percentage towards institutional, and what percentage towards research infrastructure?

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Dan McTeague]

Thank you, Mr. Rajotte.

Mr. Best.

[Robert Best]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I did anticipate the question, but I don't have a pat answer—not surprisingly, I think.

It is a very important question. I'm not going to have an answer today that it ought to be 40-20-20. We are working on it. I'm not sure we're going to come up with ratios, but there are two points I would make.

First of all, I don't think we can divorce the question of the ratios from the question of the overall level of funding. I think the starting point has to be, how are we doing against international competitors, and within that, how do we allocate the investments to make sure we remain competitive? I know you didn't pose it this way, but I frequently had it posed to me by officials: let's assume there's not another dollar; how would you divide up the existing pie? Well, it's not a conversation that I think is useful, and I know you didn't pose it that way. But I do think the point needs to be made that the starting point is how we are doing against the rest of the world and our competitors.

As to the relative balance, the one other point I would make, which I made in our opening presentation, is that for our members the issue of institutional costs remains the overriding priority. We feel that moving to a minimum 40% reimbursement rate is crucially important. So that would be our priority.

That's as far as I would go in offering up numbers as to ratios.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Dan McTeague]

Mr. Phillipson.

[Dr. Eliot Phillipson]

I will take a stab at giving some numbers.

If we look back now at the first seven or eight years of CFI's existence, we see that because there had been such a deficit in infrastructure in universities, the percentage of the total federal research investment, as you've put it, that went into infrastructure averaged 27% of the total. Two years ago when we were making our presentations, we said that we thought 20% now would be sufficient, and that is to both sustain the investments at state-of-the-art level and ensure that we can continue to invest in new facilities, but some of the back-up, the catch-up, had already been done.

That figure, interestingly, we arrived at by looking at Canadian needs, but it turns out that it is very much in keeping with what other countries are doing. In the U.S. it's 22% to 27%, in Australia 20%, and in U.K. 22%. So for what that's worth, compared to other countries, it's something in the order of 20%.

And without going into the detail, you might say, how did we get there? We looked at costs, what the depreciation is, the scientific depreciation on the equipment and the infrastructure, and what it will cost per year to maintain it at state-of-the-art level. So that was the sustainability fees, and then we added in what we anticipated would be needed for new emerging areas in which we had not previously invested.

It's a very crude calculation, but it's an attempt to answer your question.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Dan McTeague]

Very briefly, Mr. Godbout, and then we'll have to wrap up.

[Dr. Martin Godbout]

For the genomic field, again it's hard to compare, but after eight years, 80% is going to operations for the projects, 15% for infrastructure and equipment, and about 5% to 6%, the rest, for the G and A, the general administration.