Thank you very much for the invitation to appear before you. It is much appreciated.
You are consulting with us on issues with respect to economic growth, and I want to speak to you about what I believe to be the critically important role of universities and colleges across the country in helping with economic growth. In particular, I am going to focus on New Brunswick and my university, and the role that we are trying to play in returning New Brunswick to sustainable economic growth.
For me, a minimum bar of achievement for our province would be to become a “have province”. I think that's actually a pretty low bar, but let's recognize that 36 cents of every public dollar that is spent in this country is from equalization payments. I think that part of our political discourse should be around how we wean ourselves off that dependence on our friends in the rest of the country.
Our university has some 10,000 students—2,000 of them here in our campus at Saint John, and another 8,000 in Fredericton. We are 233 years old, the oldest English language university in the country, and we were found to be the country's most entrepreneurial university by Startup Canada in 2014. They've never held that competition again, so we'll wear that title forever, I hope.
It is a challenge for us to maintain the activities that led to that award. In particular, I want to tell you about the development of clusters in engineering and computer science, and in fact, in our faculty of arts, where we have built alliances with industries, both global companies and local firms.
For example, in the smart grid, we have a collaboration between Siemens Canada, New Brunswick Power, Emera—the Nova Scotia holding power company—and IBM. The smart grid is all about the efficient and best use of electricity as we build micro-generation facilities that will feed power back into the grid. There are very complicated intellectual and technical problems involved in that. The president of Siemens Canada, Robert Hardt, articulated the vision for this group as building the global utility operating system for the future, right here in New Brunswick.
This is the kind of ambition that we have. We believe we have many solutions in hand. We are working with a JDI firm to build an advanced manufacturing cluster. We want the manufacturing sector here in New Brunswick to be globally competitive. As Jim was suggesting earlier, we have to keep our eye on that ball—being globally competitive. That means our manufacturers need access to the latest and greatest in technology, in materials and in manufacturing techniques.
Our faculty have that expertise, and it can be brought to bear on their needs. We believe we have solutions in hand. Our challenge is to scale them up.
I would argue that economic growth and competitiveness across the country demand sustained investments in research and development by our federal government. You have many programs that are doing that and doing very well. I would suggest that they do need attention, and they can always be tweaked to make them better.
I would particularly mention the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. It has been around for a long time. It has been viewed here in this part of the country as largely successful, to the point where the previous government, in fact, duplicated those economic development agencies in other parts of the country. I would suggest to you that a very good idea on the part of the federal government would be to increase investments in ACOA.
They know what they're doing. They know the players. They have their established and understood systems of due diligence, and they are becoming better and better at making the right investments in the right people and the right institutions, particularly since—I have to say this —Francis McGuire has become the president. There is somebody who's doing a really great job for the federal government at the moment, on the economic development front.
Finally, we have an economist at the University of New Brunswick by the name of Herb Emery. He has done some work on what he refers to as the innovation gap. There is about $100 million in additional investment flowing into Nova Scotia, a province of similar size to New Brunswick. We are $100 million down in investment in R and D in our province, and we refer to this as the innovation funding gap. Again, I think this could be usefully addressed through ACOA.
There's a whole system of innovation support that we have here in Atlantic Canada, and the federal and provincial governments co-operate very well on that front.
I welcome any questions you may have. Thank you for your time and attention.