Good morning, Mr. Chair, and distinguished committee members.
On behalf of the Council of Ontario Universities, thank you for this opportunity to present this morning.
Approximately 42% of all students studying in universities in Canada are in Ontario. These 21 institutions provide a diversity of experiences in academic programs and research opportunities that they provide. Universities are true community partners. They contribute to economic, social, and cultural development that have impact locally, provincially, nationally, and internationally. Whether it is creating new ideas or applying them, universities represent an enormous capacity to solve problems that society faces today and in the future.
In a previous written submission to your committee, the Council of Ontario Universities asked the federal government to invest in three important areas in budget 2010: research, the recruitment of international students, and supports for our aboriginal learners. Investment in all three areas is critical to individuals whose lives will be directly changed by your decisions, but also to communities, our province and country.
I'll focus the remainder of my remarks on just one of these priority areas, and that is research. Put simply: research matters. It matters because it impacts individual lives. It helps us in a global context to see the world from different perspectives, and it awakens individual potential for problem solving and creativity. It matters because it leads to new products, processes, treatments, and services that make a difference for many individuals in society. It matters because knowledge, new and old, is essential to our economic future. It supports a diversified and robust economy based on innovation led by the brightest of minds. The reality of competition in a knowledge-based global economy is that the advantage goes to countries that are innovative, productive, and technologically savvy. In other words, it goes to those that invest heavily in the skills of their citizens.
Canada needs people with advanced skills and entrepreneurial spirit. Universities are primary providers of this talent, and they support the acquisition of leading-edge skills in areas of specialized knowledge needed to drive the economy. Through educational programs and numerous partnerships, universities help Canada's talent pool explore their creativity and imagination, inspiring the possibility of innovation in all aspects of their lives.
Second, in a knowledge-based economy what matters is the ability to acquire knowledge but also to apply it. Canadian researchers must be able to apply their cutting-edge knowledge to tackle the toughest challenges facing Canadian industry today. Centres of excellence and research, universities, play an essential role in the innovation system, and their faculty and students ensure that the innovation pipeline is continually fed.
Let me quickly share a few examples to illustrate the impact of recommendations this committee has made to invest directly in university-based research. Researchers at Queen's University are developing a novel technique for improving the reliability and performance of solar water heaters that can cut heating costs by 50%. The systems are now being installed across North America, and more recently they were installed at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. At York University, a public-private partnership involving companies such as IBM and numerous SMEs are establishing a new consortium to develop the next generation of medical device technologies. The York region is currently home to nearly 50% of Canadian medical device technologies.
As a result of collaborations between Lakehead University and Genesis Genomics, early cancer detection products are under development in Thunder Bay. Genesis Genomics is one of Canada's top ten biotech companies. There are many other examples of different types that illustrate successful social and economic outcomes of research that is under way in virtually every university in this province. Many initiatives are developed through successful public and private sector partnerships.
We know that the committee's work is particularly difficult in this current fiscal climate. We also acknowledge the large number of voices competing for scarce resources. The federal government has played a leading role in investing in research and innovation, and we are thankful for those investments. The knowledge infrastructure program is the most recent example. But now is not the time to lose the momentum created by those investments. We need to put them to work and increase the return on investment in the future. We need those investments to compete globally.
Through a significant investment in the three research-granting councils at the federal level—the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research—researchers will be able to perform more and better research, move the continuum from fundamental to applied, collaborate with greater speed with industry partners, train more graduates and post-doctoral fellows in the global talent race, and make productive use of the infrastructure investments made recently and over the last decade. This investment will contribute to a prosperous Canada.
Thank you for providing the opportunity to speak with you today. I would be pleased to answer your questions.