Thank you very much, colleagues. On behalf of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, I bring greetings and thank you for the opportunity to present before the committee.
Sunnybrook is one of Canada’s largest and most critical care facilities that are research intensive—and in fact we're dedicated to inventing the future of health care. The concept in the brief I presented to this committee focuses on health care, and actually positions health care as one of the largest expense items that we as a nation are involved in. It's in excess of a $200 billion a year business in terms of taxpayers' dollars.
The focus of the brief is on how can we better capitalize on the largest business that this country is in? How can we better monetize the investments made thus far? The concept presented is that of discovery to clinical impact through the medical marketplace.
Just to skip to the bottom line, research is in fact not an expenditure. It truly is an investment. The research and the innovation it drives is fundamental to solutions for our increasing national health care expenditures: bending the cost curve; increasing cost avoidance; and supporting a material economic upside with private sector partnerships, company creation, and job creation.
The role of technology development commercialization is fundamental to getting our discoveries to our patients. It's high risk and high cost. The need for private sector partnership is absolutely essential, and this mutually beneficial initiative is a rate-limiting step.
Health research is uniquely positioned to lay the foundation for a more innovative and productive society with very clear deliverables. We're not there, but we're getting closer: improving health training for the next generation of health researchers and practitioners; building an evidence-based sustainable system that delivers state-of-the-art health care; and of course driving the development of new products, services, and attracting investments and creating jobs.
To achieve the full gambit we must integrate these activities and resource all stakeholders along the continuum from discovery to clinical impact through the medical marketplace. We're not doing that now. Our investments are currently profoundly imbalanced.
The three recommendations highlighted are not intended to solve world hunger; they're intended actually to make a very positive step forward in rebalancing public investment in this continuum. It focuses on where the gaps are and how they may be better addressed towards doing this business better.
The first one relates to fueling the discovery engine, and I will be very brief on this as my colleague, Gilles Patry, has already highlighted the need for the infrastructure. But we need fuel to fund this engine.
We applaud the Government of Canada for initiating and for its ongoing and continuous support of sustainable funding for the Canada Foundation for Innovation. That gives us place.
We congratulate the government for the Canada research chair program and its ongoing support. That gives us people.
So we have wonderful infrastructure, we have some of the best minds in the world, and when we drive up to the gas station, there's no gas.
Funding to the Tri-Council has not kept pace with the growth in other dimensions, and our first recommendation is to increase that budget. I have to tell you that this is a modest request of $300 million over the next three years to benefit our investments already made in other arenas.
The second recommendation deals with research as well. In order to spend a dollar that any one of us gets from the Tri-Council, it costs another 45¢. Everybody around this table agrees that the full cost of research needs to be funded and once we've achieved that unanimity, eventually everybody leaves the table.
Right now we've made a good start in the indirect cost program. The challenge is how those dollars are deployed. The recommendation is rather than making this a capacity-building program, send the money directly at a flat rate to where the research is happening.
The final recommendation also relates to FedDev. Here, congratulations to the government. Our recommendation is that given the size of the business of health care and medical research, a greater proportion of that FedDev envelope should be applied to medical research.
Sunnybrook is capitalized, it's expressed in the brief, it is an economic driver.
Thank you very much.