I have some comments from London, Madam Chair.
First you have to define who is good at research and who is failing at research. There are scientists in many different disciplines, of course, and across a great scale, all the way from academia to industry. When you have critical masses in any given area, you start to accumulate more and more talent. We have critical mass in academic research. I think that's why Canadian universities tend to do quite well across a large range of disciplines, particularly in health care.
However, we do not have in this country a critical mass of innovative companies that are involved in medical devices or in drugs. We have a few, many of them branch plants of large multinationals, so that their heart is not in Canada. Because we don't have this environment, we don't develop the people we need for assessing technologies for the companies. There is no need for them.
I have been doing a lot of consulting for venture capital companies, for 20 years, in fact. I have never once in 20 years gone to a place in Canada to assess a technology. Canadian companies hire me to go to the United States and Europe to assess technology. When I file patents, I use lawyers in either Milwaukee or Chicago, because there are no Canadian patent lawyers who know the technology I'm developing.
We need a major sea change here, and I don't think forcing academic scientists to do the commercialization is the right idea. We need, and the government needs to make, an environment in which innovative companies or academics who want to leave academia and go into commercialization, of whom there are many, would be facilitated in doing so. It's partly a question of tax structure, partly of incentives, partly of being able to provide real estate in proximity to major centres of academic innovation.
If we don't have those, we can't build that culture. We can keep digging and drilling and cutting and fishing for the next 100 years. It won't change many of our lives. But when all that is gone—and it will be, as it has gone in Japan, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom—we will be 200 years behind all these other countries in boarding the innovation band wagon.