Thank you for inviting me.
I apologize for not having a formal, written program. I've been travelling for the last couple of weeks. It's always a pleasure to come in and speak. I have this in PowerPoint form.
I've spent over 30 years in the agricultural industry, the first 15 years with the industry in research and development and marketing. Then in Saskatoon I started up Ag-West Biotech in 1989 and helped build a cluster around the ag-biotech sector. I was then Deputy Minister of Agriculture for Saskatchewan. After that, I started Ontario Agri-food Technologies, which is run by Gord Surgeoner today.
I ran a venture capital fund for seven or eight years, where I focused on investing in agricultural technology at the university level. Then I moved a little bit away from agriculture. I went back to Saskatoon and for three years I was the director of business development for the Synchrotron, helping to build the business development side of that research facility.
Two and a half years ago, I came back to Ontario to manage Sustainable Chemistry Alliance and the Bioindustrial Innovation Centre in Sarnia. They are focused on agriculture and the commercialization of the bioindustrial sector.
I wanted to touch on Sustainable Chemistry Alliance and the Bioindustrial Innovation Centre. Sustainable Chemistry Alliance is a facilitator, adviser, and investor in green and sustainable technologies, while the Bioindustrial Innovation Centre is the incubator that provides pilot facility space for green and sustainable technology. We are located in Sarnia. I work closely with the university systems in Ontario, particularly Western.
Our key objective is to establish Sarnia as a model cluster community. We are building off the petroleum expertise in the region and the farming community in Lambton County and the surrounding counties of the region. BIC and SCA are a centre for excellence funded by NSERC and the national centres of excellence.
With respect to the Sustainable Chemistry Alliance, we've set aside some $5 million for investing in startup companies. These are companies that are entering into a kind of valley of death. We're investing in companies and projects on the pilot-to-demonstration scale. We might invest up to a half million dollars in any given project. We ended up with 12 investments. We're just finishing the legal work on the last two or three. We've been able to leverage well over $100 million in other investments. One investment that we recently closed on is BioAmber, which is going to build a full-scale facility in Sarnia. That will create 40 full-time jobs as well as about 150 construction jobs over the next year and a half. The investments we've made have pulled in well over 200 jobs.
We've attracted two companies back to Canada: Ecosynthetix, which uses corn-based materials for paper coatings, selling their product to big pulp and paper mills; and BioAmber, which produces succinic acid. A lot of this research was funded outside Canada by the USDA or the U.S. Department of Energy, and now we have them back with Canada as their headquarters and their first commercial opportunities ahead of them.
The first full-scale biotechnology plant is something that we look at. We look at how to commercialize what we have locally and to help move some of those technologies forward. But how do we attract technologies back into Canada?
The bioindustrial sector is really biomaterials, bio-based chemicals, hybrid chemicals, biomass production and processing, and new crops for alternative use such as switchgrass, miscanthus, and camelina.
I should clarify the term “hybrid chemistry”. In Sarnia we have a strong petroleum-based industry, and as we're developing these bio-based industries we see a partnership between the petroleum and the bio-based industries to build new products, which would be bio-based plus petroleum-based to create what we refer to as a hybrid chemical or a hybrid product. An example of that would be Woodbridge foam. About 20% of their foam uses soybean, and the other 80% comes from petroleum. Almost every car seat for vehicles produced in the world today uses a hybrid foam from Woodbridge.
What are the benefits to agriculture of what we do? Biomass is a new source of income for a number of farmers as we move forward in trying to develop this as a commercial opportunity. Some new crops such as triticale, camelina, sorghum, miscanthus, switchgrass, etc., are being researched today and developed into future crops. And then there's consistent or improved value at the farm gate as we have additional products that the farmers will be able to sell, whether it's corn stover or wheat straw, as they manage those opportunities. Hopefully, as we see these develop we'll see more rural jobs coming from that as well.
Based on the questions I have of what should Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada be doing, particularly as far as Growing Forward 2, there are investment programs. I think a lot of the investment programs like the Agri-Opportunities program that we had in Growing Forward 1...we need to look at those and learn from them. They were excellent programs, from my perspective, but probably were not fully utilized in the way they should have been. And maybe by looking at arm's length and with a little bit more flexibility in those programs, it would help make them much more productive in the future. I use our example of taking $5 million and creating well over $100 million in investment as something that was done at arm's length using funding.
Focused research and development with farmer and industry input into the projects.... I think the earlier speakers talked about the length of time, and I think that's one of the things that we.... Time now has become shortened on a lot of funding, and we need to think about that. As I look at Europe, most European countries now have plans out to 2025 or 2030 on their programs, and they don't change those programs. They might tweak them as they move forward, as they learn from this year and going into next year, but they have a plan that's out there for 20 or 30 years on how they want to develop their agricultural community. We tend to operate on a two-year to four-year timeline, so I think we need to think longer term than that.
Bioindustrial programs, I think, are going to be more important going forward, supporting innovative ideas from the agricultural commodity sector. We'll see new biomaterials, new plastics, and new bio-based chemicals coming on stream, and if we don't do it here, it will be done somewhere.
Attraction to Canada is important. We do not invent everything here, so we should be looking to what's out there that we can bring back into Canada at the same time. Examples are BioAmber and the Ecosynthetix projects that we've had. Recently, I was in South Africa, where we've signed an MOU with an organization down there that has investments in start-up companies in the same sector, so there is an opportunity to create collaboration between companies in South Africa and here in North America.
I have a couple of other quick comments. I think the regulatory framework is a very important one, but I will comment that I've been involved in regulatory for 30-plus years and it's been an ongoing topic for that length of time. My simple solution would be that we have one of the best regulatory systems in the world and I think we should just learn how to use it. That's our biggest problem, that we don't use the system properly. We use it as a system that basically says we're here to protect the Canadian public by not allowing new products in the system, rather than looking at it as something that is a strong science-based system that can be used to get products into the market and create economic benefits for the Canadian consumer and Canadian businesses. That would create farm benefits and so on.
There's an opportunity for Canada to take on a leadership role in bio-based chemistry and the biomaterials sector for agriculture and forestry. We can develop alternative crops and new uses of biomass through the development of innovative ideas; establish a sound science-based, user-friendly, and efficient regulatory system; and have a program for attracting to Canada the right agriculture and bioindustrial companies that we are not seeing here today.
Let's be leaders in that sector and consider arm's-length concepts to increase efficiency in some of our programs.
In summary, Growing Forward 2 has an opportunity to look back at Growing Forward 1 and evaluate what worked well and what did not. There are lessons to be learned and concepts to be improved from Growing Forward 1 to 2, whether it is to continue to support those projects that were innovative, change those with limited success, and/or consider arm's length for programs that need to make timely decisions.
Some research-supported initiatives need to be assessed for progress to development and commercialization, and they need to be supported if progress was made from Growing Forward 1. Then a user-friendly regulatory system should be created with economic development as a mandate.
Thank you.