Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to address you and the finance committee today.
My name is Oliver Technow, and I'm accompanied by Ms. Heather Delage. The organization we lead, right here in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, can truly be considered a prime example of how an entrepreneurial vision can turn into global leadership in one of the most competitive areas: pharmaceutical ingredient manufacturing.
I have two objectives today with my five minutes. I would like to share a little of our BioVectra story with you so that you can envision how innovative clusters can help create and lead a knowledge-based economy, not only in what we consider the big centres in this country, such as Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, or Calgary, but also right here in beautiful in Atlantic Canada, where we have some of the best universities and colleges in the country and a very talented and highly skilled workforce that is looking for ways to drive the economy here.
Second, as you know, BioVectra has provided a written submission and has developed alongside that a very compelling business case that would help operationalize a major facility in Windsor, Nova Scotia, which we've purchased and have started retrofitting. We are asking the finance committee to recommend federal government investment in BioVectra in its pre-budget report. I want to be very clear at this point that this is not a corporate handout. This is a very smart investment that will quickly pay dividends for many years to come and can lead to the creation of hundreds of jobs in the outskirts of Halifax.
I truly hope that you see how our current business model and our future vision will help to answer all three of the finance committee's questions that have been posed: by boosting employment in rural Canada; by expanding an innovative and knowledge-based company that supports economic diversification in Atlantic Canada; and as well, as an organization, by providing cutting-edge technology and innovation and exporting that to the globe.
Let me introduce you briefly to what BioVectra does. We are a contract manufacturing and development organization applying world-leading technology in the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector. We have a speciality in the area of fermentation, which is a technology that is used in a lot of innovative drugs these days. We are headquartered here in Prince Edward Island. BioVectra can already be considered as the premier life sciences company in Atlantic Canada, which has a growing bioscience cluster. We have three active manufacturing and research and development facilities in total and we employ already a little over 300 people here in Atlantic Canada. I would strongly encourage you, if you fly out later today from the airport, to just turn your head to the left so you can see our biggest facility right there at Aviation Avenue, where we produce commercial-grade active pharmaceutical ingredients in both the synthetic and biologic products areas.
I'll give you a bit of the history as well. BioVectra is on a very impressive growth trajectory, which sets us quite apart from our competition. It started off very small, truly as an entrepreneurial dream and vision in the 1970s. The first couple of decades were clearly dedicated towards developing expertise in scaled chemical manufacturing, which then led in the 1990s to the first outreaches into the market as a contract manufacturing organization. Only in the last few years has BioVectra truly reached the stage of global competition where we consider ourselves one of the leading organizations in our space. We do have strong relationships, business relationships, and long-standing long-term contracts with probably most of the top 20 pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the world.
Now that you've heard a little about who we are and our outreach and our organization, I would like to share my vision for the organization and how to expand into eastern Canada.
Our operation in Windsor, Nova Scotia, has been the subject of a major retrofit. Our objective is to install large-scale fermentation there, which is an important addition to our manufacturing continuum and is important for our competitiveness in the global world. We have already invested $20 million for the retrofit of this facility over the last two years, which was acquired in 2014.
Today, we are at the point that to still have a viable business case that benefits the Canadian economy, we are looking to secure partnership government grant support so that we can complete the work and get the site up and running. We envision this to be possible in 12 to 18 months. I ask for an investment of $10 million from the Government of Canada. With this investment, this partnership grant, BioVectra would be able to get this operation up and going.
The key question, obviously, is why: why would the Canadian government consider this investment in this organization? I believe this is a very strong and simple case to make. If the plant is operationalized.... As I've said, we believe we could do this in 12 to 18 months. Please have a look at the binder we gave you, which shows that this site already exists; we have a couple of pictures that bring to life where this currently stands. If the plant is operationalized, it would create up to 70 new jobs. That is a rather conservative guess on our end. For both the commercial fermentation and laboratory process development at this site, we will require a very unique set of highly skilled talent. We need microbiologists, biochemists, and biochemical engineers, as well as highly trained and skilled operations staff.
While direct employment may add up to 70 jobs, it's the spinoff jobs that truly make a big difference in this investment. Based on experience, we know that once a facility and a manufacturing site of this scale becomes operational, hundreds of spinoff jobs are created in the immediate environment for vendors, suppliers, and everybody who has to help to keep this site going. This would create a significant economic boost to Nova Scotia. BioVectra would be committed to attracting and retaining workers in Nova Scotia's highly educated workforce and in driving the diversification of the local economy, consequently reducing unemployment in this area.
We believe this investment is directly aligned with and supports the federal government's innovation agenda and, equally, the Atlantic Canada growth strategy. A positive return on this investment of the federal contribution in terms of the spinoff jobs, the growing tax base for the province and the federal government, would be quickly realized—you can do the math—in a couple of years, and it would continue in perpetuity.
We have reached out to many stakeholders in Canada over the last few weeks to share our vision for expansion into eastern Canada. We spoke with the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, ACOA, and to members of Finance Canada, Innovation Canada, and other federal organizations, and, as you would imagine, with the local and provincial governments in P.E.I. and Nova Scotia as well. Everyone is excited about this opportunity because it's such a compelling case to make.
This is truly about a knowledge-based company and a knowledge-based economy growing in Atlantic Canada, boosting exports into the globe. It's not only for the pharmaceutical cluster in New England and between the Ontario-Quebec corridor. This is truly about competing on the world stage out of Atlantic Canada. It would create a future for highly skilled Canadians and immigrants who you would have to attract to run this organization in Nova Scotia, in an area that probably needs growth like this more than other areas of the country. BioVectra is truly ready and wants to play a key role in that vision in close partnership with the Government of Canada.
I thank this distinguished committee for giving me the opportunity to be part of this discussion. I'm looking forward to your questions.