Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My name is Feridun Hamdullahpur. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee.
As chair of the U15, I'm here representing the group of Canada's research-intensive universities from across the country. I'm also president and vice-chancellor of the University of Waterloo.
To give you a sense of the scale of the U15, our 15 universities educate nearly 585,000 students and perform research worth $8.5 billion annually. That represents more than a quarter of all research, both academic and non-academic, in Canada. This combination of teaching and research makes Canada’s research-intensive universities a platform on which many of our country’s competitive advantages are built.
Research universities produce groundbreaking discoveries and are training sites for top research and innovation leaders for all sectors of the economy. They help attract and retain leading global talent and contribute expertise to a wide range of commercial and social endeavours.
Fuelled by discovery-driven research excellence, U15 institutions produce expertise that drives innovative Canadian businesses, informs public policy, and develops sustainable approaches that address our most pressing issues, from climate change to indigenous relations to natural resource development to clean technologies.
To ensure that Canada remains globally competitive with regard to innovation, we need to build on the foundations of research excellence. To this end, the U15 has two strategic and concrete suggestions for investment.
First, research investments from Canada’s three granting councils are the backbone of Canada’s research excellence. These investments support discovery-driven research, university/industry research partnerships, recruiting and retaining world-class researchers, and training Canada’s next generation of leaders. Since 2007, inflation has eroded federal funding to the tri-council by $176 million.
To ensure that Canada’s research excellence platform continues to support our innovation ecosystem, we propose that the government commit to increasing funding to the tri-council and the research support fund to their inflation-adjusted 2007-08 levels over the next four years and commit to indexing this funding moving forward.
The post-secondary sector is well poised to stimulate our economy with efficient and effective infrastructure upgrades. Our second proposal is to invest in Canada’s research infrastructure through the innovative campus infrastructure program. College and university campuses across the country have a wide range of infrastructure needs and upgrades that could improve health and safety, energy efficiency, and our capacity to undertake leading-edge research.
We surveyed our 15 universities this year and found an estimated $3.7 billion in shovel-ready on-campus projects, ranging from renewing and expanding teaching laboratories, arts centres, and libraries to upgrading heating systems, waste management systems, and on-campus lighting to improve energy efficiency. These projects have well-defined parameters and can be implemented in a timely fashion.
These investments will improve Canada’s capacity for groundbreaking research and strengthen our robust research environment, allowing Canada to attract and retain top talent, build strong research clusters, and foster the culture of innovation we need to prosper in a sustainable way.
I kept my remarks fairly brief in the interest of time, but I will be happy to answer your questions later on.
Thank you very much.