Mr. Chair and members, thank you very much for the chance to speak to you.
As you know, the University of Waterloo is very heavily engaged in digital media production and new technologies. I'd like to present my comments to you in three areas--opportunities, challenges, and next steps--as we contemplate going forward.
I'm going to put it to you very clearly that I think digital media and our ability to compete in digital media is essential to the challenge of winning the 21st century on the economic front. This is not a small question.
Digital media has been allowing countries and regions to leapfrog each other economically in a way that's not really been possible in the past. We are seeing remarkable changes in places where they're least expected. The uptake of mobile phones, for example, in Africa is something that people had not predicted 15 years ago but is a reality of that continent.
We're also seeing a remarkable shift away from the digital media technology to digital content and services--not the capacity to use the Internet but in fact what goes over it. And we've seen some remarkable change in very short order from what we call Web 1.0, which was really the posting of information online, to Web 2.0, which is interactive websites, to what we're now describing as Web 3.0, which includes things like the semantical web, where the Internet and computers have the capacity to do an awful lot of thinking for you. And the transformational effects of that are really quite profound.
So what are the opportunities?
Number one, recognize that in Canada cultural production is a major Canadian competitive advantage. We do extremely well in producing content. Whether it's animation, video games, films, or what have you, we do very well.
Secondly, we have a tremendous opportunity in education. Canada's education is of very high quality, and at some point we'll realize that this in fact could be a globally competitive industry. The largest universities in the world are all distance education universities. They have two million to three million students in a single institution. If we can hook up into that, the brains and intelligence of Canada could be spread around the world.
We obviously can use digital media to overcome distance and isolation. And I think there are some tremendous opportunities in the promotion of Canadian cultural understanding. Christie Digital, a Waterloo-based firm, is one of the best immersive technologies in the world of virtual reality chambers, basically. The opportunity to use that technology for heritage sites and national parks has the potential to allow all of Canada to come together very quickly.
We also have a very great competitive advantage in the order of the rule of law and good governance. There's an opportunity for Canada around intellectual property rights and copyright protection. I think the world in fact would look to Canada if we were successful in addressing that major issue.
Finally, bilingualism and multiculturalism present enormous opportunities in Canada and beyond to actually connect up to the linguistic and cultural diversity of this country.
What are the challenges?
Mr. Hennessy and others will know the challenges on keeping up with infrastructure. It's a very significant challenge for us. But I think some of our challenges are more conceptual than they are technical. We have to learn to move much faster and more effectively in digital media. We've actually been moving quite slowly. We are not a fast nation when it comes to digital media. Countries as diverse as Taiwan, Korea--South Korea, in particular--Japan, and Malaysia are moving much faster.
To stick with Asia for a second, there's a very interesting phenomenon happening in digital media in East Asia and South Asia. For the first time in many years, those countries are basically becoming more regionally focused. They are producing digital content for themselves and not for North American markets. They are massive markets--a billion-plus people in China, many hundreds of millions in the region as a whole. And we are actually not well connected.
Some of you may know the name of Matthew Lien. I'm not sure if any of you have ever heard Matthew Lien. He's actually a Yukon-based musician, a very interesting man. I can almost never find anybody in Canada who's ever heard of him, but he's extremely famous in Taiwan and in China.
There's actually a fairly significant group of Canadians who have ignored the Canadian market and are doing very well overseas. We absolutely urgently need to do something about our Asia connections. Canada's Asia connections are weak, and they're getting weaker. They're not getting stronger. And on digital media, there's an enormous opportunity.
There are two other things. Perhaps one is a bit surprising. We're not as well connected up to the new mobile technology--not the technology, we're okay on the technology; it's actually the applications. We're not connecting up there as quickly as we could.
To offer a strange one, loyalty has become a fundamental challenge for Canada. We lose many of our highly qualified personnel. In fact, one of the standard realities of start-up companies in the digital media space is to basically get started in Canada and then leave, either to be sold outside of the country or to move themselves.
In contrast to other countries--and again, I would draw your attention to Taiwan, to South Korea, and to India--we are making very few efforts to bring those Canadian digital media firms and those individuals back home.
What are our next steps?
My suggestion would be that we actually make sure that digital content is more forcefully integrated into our national innovation strategy. Canada is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on national innovation, but cultural content and digital content is not really understood as a major economic force. It is now and will be in the future.
I think we need a major win in the area of Canadian heritage online, a major significant national project that shows that Canada is in fact ready to tackle global leadership in the field. We need to pick up our speed and our focus. Canada has to move faster and in a more targeted way. In digital media winners and losers change place very, very quickly, and we're not moving at the speed that we should be doing. We have seen some very important developments here. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has done a great job of reconfiguring its activities in this regard, but quite frankly, at all levels of governments--municipal, federal, and provincial--our granting system does not move at the speed of the Internet. If you compare what we do in Canada to what they do in Singapore or Taiwan, where a handful of people can make decisions in a couple of days, our processes take as much as two years. Two years is a lifetime in the digital media space. It's not fast enough. We have to change.
We need to issue a loyalty challenge. There's nothing wrong with our country being proud about being Canadian and asking our entrepreneurs and creative people to stay in Canada and to invite those who've gone overseas to actually come back home. Other countries are doing that. They are leaving our country to go back overseas. We need to invite our folks back to this country.
Finally, I think we need a digital brand. We need a substantial digital presence that actually has a global impact. We have to show the world that we're in the game. There's a little bit of branding. Research in Motion and Open Text are two good examples of that, but Canada does not yet have a really truly national presence as a major digital nation.
I thank you for the opportunity to speak to you.