Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak here today on behalf of the Deans' Council to discuss food processing in Canada, a topic that's even more critical in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
After a brief introduction to the Deans' Council—Agriculture, Food and Veterinary Medicine faculties, we wish to address two things. The first is the importance of innovation and innovation training for building an internationally competitive food processing sector. Second is the importance of taking an integrated approach to the continuum that is environmental health, animal health and human health. Canada's food processing industry is an integral part of that continuum.
The Deans' Council is a pan-Canadian network of eight agricultural faculties and five veterinary colleges for training, research and knowledge translation. It's really a core to the national ecosystem in food, agriculture and health. Indeed, as one of the world's most advanced producers of food, Canada does have a leadership role to play in meeting the expanding requirement of the globe for quality nutrition.
As a result, Canada's communities and trading partners must have confidence in the integrity, resilience and safety of our food system. It's important to emphasize that the Deans' Council faculties not only hold the talent, but they're also responsible for developing the talent and the knowledge that will enable the tremendous economic and export growth potential of Canada's agri-food sector to be realized.
Our faculties also contribute to public confidence in the integrity and safety of Canada's food system, and they also shield it and potentially also our health care system from future infectious disease incursions, food safety threats and environmental risks.
About a year ago the Deans' Council worked with Industry, Science and Economic Development Canada to produce a report examining the path to growth for Canada's food and beverage processing sector. More specifically, ISED asked us how the Deans' Council could help cultivate a skilled, innovation-minded workforce. How could we also marshal the enormous research and development capacity within our faculties to address the short, medium and long-term goals of a transformed food sector?
In the report to ISED Canada, we made various recommendations that our analysis showed were necessary for attracting a diverse set of students to our faculties, and that way we could ensure that there was a broad range of ideas and creative solutions to both ingredient and process innovations.
One recommendation was the need for renewal of core infrastructure that is absolutely vital for student training as well as for research. It's worth noting that hundreds of scientists and indeed thousands of students in our faculties conduct internationally recognized research that fuels ingredient innovation for Canada's crops and livestock. They also devise process science innovations for retooling Canada's small to medium-sized enterprises. As you're likely aware, it's these SMEs that dominate Canada's food processing landscape.
When we did this, though, as deans we recognized that we couldn't take a narrow perspective on just renewal of infrastructure for the food process sector, because consumer choice and confidence in food is increasingly driven by considerations of this important lifeline between human health, animal health, plant health and environmental health. The intimacy of this lifeline is recognized through a one-health concept, a concept that's been endorsed by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization as the way to tackle zoonotic disease threats.
Renewal of the research, innovation and training capacity in our veterinary and agriculture facilities must be a priority if we're realistic in our aspirations to turn natural capital, through our human capital, into an international leadership position for our agri-food industry.
An investment into unique, cutting-edge, highly connected national initiatives will provide the evidence that Canada is willing to protect its borders and its communities from current and future infectious diseases and food safety threats. The investment will also fundamentally strengthen Canada's economic recovery from this pandemic and prepare us for future pandemics.
The first of these investments, “growing Canada”, is directed to training and research capacity in sustainable ag and food processing. This will integrate the academic innovation that's spread across the country for the prospering of Canada's agriculture and food processing sectors. The second, “one health Canada”, will integrate science and data-driven approaches to human, animal and environmental health risks: these risks have been starkly evident over the past year, but it will also propose solutions to these threats. These two initiatives are interconnected and interdependent, and both are vital elements for the economic and social progress of a growing agri-food sector.
As Monsieur Seppey had talked about earlier on, this is warranted not only by the size of the industry, its importance to our national economy, but also its effect on the employment sector. One point Monsieur Seppey emphasized is the fact that both these metrics, the employment and the size of the sector, are growing faster in the agri-food sector than in other sectors of the economy.
In closing, the Deans' Council would emphasize one salutary lesson from COVID: we cannot take our food system for granted. We ask you to use the Deans' Council as a valuable resource for both building talent and knowledge creation for the agri-food sector. It's this innovation-focused perspective on the development of the tools and the talent in agri-food and veterinary science that will sustainably fashion the long-term economic and social benefits of Canada's agri-food system.
Thank you.