Evidence of meeting #32 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was patent.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Gay Yuyitung  Business Development Manager, McMaster Industry Liaison Office, McMaster University
Scott Inwood  Director, Commercialization, University of Waterloo
David Barnard  President and Vice-Chancellor, University of Manitoba
Digvir Jayas  Vice-President, Research and International, University of Manitoba
Catherine Beaudry  Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical and Industrial Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal , As an Individual

10:05 a.m.

NDP

Dan Harris NDP Scarborough Southwest, ON

I apologize, and thank you to everyone for sitting patiently through that.

Ms. Beaudry, you mentioned public funding of patents and you said that the quality of citations is greater. Were you talking about five patents or five years? Perhaps you could expand on that.

10:05 a.m.

Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical and Industrial Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal , As an Individual

Catherine Beaudry

It is not very clear in my graph, but you begin to see a drop in citations after about five patents.

10:05 a.m.

NDP

Dan Harris NDP Scarborough Southwest, ON

You mentioned the importance of public funding. Could you tell us some more about that? What kind of public investment are we talking about? Does it only affect small and medium-sized businesses or universities. In what areas does public funding really help?

10:05 a.m.

Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical and Industrial Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal , As an Individual

Catherine Beaudry

Public funding has an exponential effect on the number of articles produced and the number of subsequent citations. The bigger the investment, the more students are paid to do the research and the more often large research groups are created, which results in further developments or a broader network. The more people involved, the significantly greater probability of citations. The curve goes down because there is not enough money to pay students. But then the increase you see is more or less exponential. There is a negative spiral when there is not enough money to pay enough students or fund enough research, but then there is a snowball effect when the research is funded.

What I mean, in a nutshell, is that you have to have a minimum amount of money if you want to produce enough quality research.

10:05 a.m.

NDP

Dan Harris NDP Scarborough Southwest, ON

You need to give it a kick start.

Certainly, if we put too much money in, there ends up being waste. I think this touches a larger issue that we have in Canada, not necessarily related to IP but to how, if the supports aren't there, we're starting to fall behind in PhD students and the number of people going for that extra level of education so that they can further their academic careers and get jobs afterwards that are at their skill set and level. Certainly this is worthy of looking at further.

We've heard from several witnesses—one witness in particular—about looking at a situation like Nortel's, in which all the IP was sold off. That's not subject to an Investment Canada review, whereas if Nortel as a company had been sold off with its IP, it would have been.

Do any of you have any comments to make about whether we should be looking at strengthening IP protections in that regard?

10:05 a.m.

Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical and Industrial Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal , As an Individual

Dr. Catherine Beaudry

If you don't have a Canadian company that can make use of these patents, then they might as well be sold to someone who can actually use the patents and create value that will eventually benefit Canadians. If we just stop the selling of these patents and nobody does anything with them, then they're actually wasted for the world.

10:10 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative David Sweet

Thank you, Madame Beaudry.

10:10 a.m.

NDP

Dan Harris NDP Scarborough Southwest, ON

We definitely don't want to see that—

10:10 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative David Sweet

Now we go on to Mr. Richardson for five minutes.

10:10 a.m.

Conservative

Lee Richardson Conservative Calgary Centre, AB

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'm delighted with this panel today. It and the contributions you make are very encouraging for the future of our country. This is wonderful, particularly the development and commercialization of the products you're speaking about. One of them you talked about today was the BlackBerry. These things are fabulous. We all have them here. They seem to be everywhere.They must have sold millions of them around the world.

Mr. Inwood, your university and some of your graduates must be pretty proud of all that.

10:10 a.m.

Director, Commercialization, University of Waterloo

Scott Inwood

RIM has been a bastion of success in the Waterloo region in general and a repository for a number of our technologies over the years.

10:10 a.m.

Conservative

Lee Richardson Conservative Calgary Centre, AB

I wondered if you're starting to feel a little guilty now after Professor Mulcair's economic revelations. Are you concerned that the soaring BlackBerry exports have inflated the Canadian dollar to the detriment of Canadian manufacturing industries?

10:10 a.m.

Director, Commercialization, University of Waterloo

Scott Inwood

I haven't looked at it from that perspective. I'll have to take your word for it.

10:10 a.m.

Some hon. members

Oh, oh!

10:10 a.m.

NDP

Brian Masse NDP Windsor West, ON

I see another type of disease over there.

10:10 a.m.

Director, Commercialization, University of Waterloo

Scott Inwood

That's all I had, sir.

10:10 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative David Sweet

Is that it Mr. Richardson?

All right, now on to Mr. Masse for five minutes.

10:10 a.m.

NDP

Brian Masse NDP Windsor West, ON

To our researchers, it would be interesting if we could get a list of Industry Canada-funded foundations that have patent- and innovation-related funds and the results of that, including the amount of money over the last maybe 10 or 20 years. It would be interesting because some of the foundations the Canadian public has been supporting have billions of dollars. It would be interesting to find out the foundations and their status. That has been one of the things that's been missed over the years.

Madame Beaudry, I was curious about your stats survey. Was that based on the census or on other surveys based on the census?

10:10 a.m.

Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical and Industrial Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal , As an Individual

Catherine Beaudry

Which survey are you talking about?

10:10 a.m.

NDP

Brian Masse NDP Windsor West, ON

The survey you talked about when doing some of your research.

10:10 a.m.

Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical and Industrial Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal , As an Individual

Dr. Catherine Beaudry

You mean the biotechnology StatsCan survey.

10:10 a.m.

NDP

Brian Masse NDP Windsor West, ON

Yes.

10:10 a.m.

Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical and Industrial Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal , As an Individual

Dr. Catherine Beaudry

It's considered a survey by Statistics Canada because it has a response rate of over 70%. It was not built as a longitudinal survey, so we have made a lot of effort to follow companies throughout because a company might answer in 1999 and then for some bizarre reason not answer the survey in 2001 and then come back in 2003 or 2005. I call it a quasi longitudinal survey because it's a bit like an emmenthal.

10:10 a.m.

NDP

Brian Masse NDP Windsor West, ON

Who funds that, because some of the hard data we have in this study—and we had a previous study in 2007—but....

10:10 a.m.

Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical and Industrial Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal , As an Individual

Dr. Catherine Beaudry

The biotech survey is an extremely rich survey, and I lobbied quite a lot of people to try to fund the 2007 survey of biotechnology. We could have had 10 years of looking very deeply into an industry in Canada. Unfortunately, I couldn't help to raise money for the survey. These types of studies allow us to examine how policy and various environments have an effect, because during the study we have done we passed through the crises of 2001 and 2007.

To give you an example, between 2007 and 2009, Quebec lost 20% more firms than it already had lost before, because firms die eventually. Quebec lost 10% of its 1999 cohort of firms by 2007, and then between 2007 and 2009, it lost a further 20%. It's as if Quebec had maintained these firms on artificial respiration. In Ontario or in B.C. the loss of these firms was much more gradual, so they didn't suffer as much in the 2008 financial crisis.

This is the kind of study we can do and it could be richer if we could merge it and look at patents and be able to merge patent with company data. I believe this is what Industry Canada is doing.