Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members.
The Partnership Group for Science and Engineering is an association of more than 25 professional and scientific organizations reflecting a diversity of science and technology interests in Canada. I represent one of those, the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. I'm joined here today by Dr. Olson, who represents the Canadian Federation of Biological Societies.
PAGSE is perhaps best known for the Bacon & Eggheads breakfast lecture series on Parliament Hill. It is held every month during the parliamentary season. There is one this coming Thursday morning.
We're not a lobby group, and we try to work in partnership with government to advance research and innovation for the benefit of all Canadians. In our written brief to the committee we focus our recommendations on the following main areas of concern: Canada's declining overall capacity for science and technology, not in an absolute sense but in a relative sense to our competitors; the lack of a national science and technology framework; weak private sector participation in science and technology in Canada; declining federal capacity in research and development and long-term monitoring within the federal government itself; and impediments to Canadian participation in international science and technology collaboration. There's a lot of money out there that we're not able to take advantage of.
I'll deal with each of those in turn and then state our recommendations at the end.
Canada is falling behind other countries in stimulating innovation, translating it into production at home and marketing production internationally. As recently stated by Kevin Lynch, Clerk of the Privy Council, in order to compete globally, Canada must improve its productivity through the development and application of science and technology. Research and innovation capacity depends on factors that include a diverse pool of expertise, a propitious investment climate, and a capacity to turn innovation into economic outcomes within Canada. It's in these latter areas that we're having problems.
The balance between government, academic, and private sector efforts requires the setting and understanding of clear priorities. Canada must develop a coherent national science and technology framework that will enable it to augment its competitive capacity. The Government of Canada needs to clearly articulate an accountability framework and evaluate the return on its investment in science and technology in order to set new priorities for future investments.
Industry support for science and technology and research lags well behind that found in other nations, especially the United States, our main competitor and market. The Expert Panel on Commercialization has evaluated this shortfall and expressed concern that in expansion-stage financing, the average venture capital investment in a U.S. company is four times that invested in a Canadian company.
The panel has made a number of recommendations, including setting up a commercialization super-fund, a Canadian small and medium enterprises partnerships initiative, a small business innovation research program, and fiscal measures relating to angel investment and foreign venture capital.
The panel also recommends upgrading existing programs such as the industrial research assistance program, the ideas to innovation program, and the proof of principle program. Moreover, the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters recently recommended the extension of the SR and ED tax credit program to cover the first stage of commercialization of new technologies. PAGSE supports all of these ideas.
The Council of Science and Technology Advisors recently found that support for government science has been static or declining over the last quarter century. The ability of federal science-based departments and agencies to address their mandates has been weakened. New state-of-the-art infrastructure across the full spectrum of government science and technology is required to restore that capacity. Achieving a coordinated government-wide balance between the priorities and competing demands of federal science-based departments and agencies will be a key challenge, which is another reason why a coherent national science and technology framework is badly needed.
Many fundamental aspects of science and technology are underpinned by stable medium to long-term programs of monitoring, data collection, and reliable data archiving and access. In addition, some fields, such as satellite-based remote sensing, are experiencing an unprecedented data flow that places enormous strains on archiving and access capacities.
These aspects of long-term monitoring capacity are beyond the mandate, capacity, and interest of university- or business-based researchers, yet investment in basic monitoring of scientific variables by the federal government has continued to decline, in spite of the fact that inadequate monitoring and last-minute science will carry a high degree of risk to the economy to Canadians and their environment and will compromise future socio-economic development.
On the international scene, Canada's capacity to participate in international science and technology programs is--