Thank you very much.
This is by the grace of my daughter Claudia, who has all the equipment needed.
I was saying that most of what we know about viruses—how the virus enters the cell, how it replicates and what the known effects and the known responses are—comes from basic and fundamental research.
With fundamental and basic research, we have all the tools in hand for treatment and for innovative new drugs. We can confront the issues that we face today and that our children will face in the future. We feel strongly that without the investments that have been made by governments, both provincial and federal, to support the scientific community, Canada would have fared far worse in the face of this pandemic.
We would also like to acknowledge the strong and coordinated response of the Canadian government and granting agencies to combat COVID-19. We appreciate the fact that this response has been led by science and the scientific insight provided by the best and brightest scientists from across the country. We also appreciate that the communication has been of high quality in accordance with the difficult circumstances. It's based on the best possible available scientific data. This is also a consequence of science long being identified as a priority for the health and security of Canadians. We will uphold this in the days that come during the pandemic.
We also appreciate the ongoing communications from governments. Here I speak of the Quebec government and the federal government, including Canada's chief public health officer. They have all been guided by science. We acknowledge that this is a difficult task and that adjustments have been made, since situations sometimes change from day to day.
Many of our members have engaged in promising research and have been at the forefront of efforts to address this pandemic. I can give an example from my own institution. Within weeks, we were able to set up a testing lab with our RNA biology experts and with the PCR machines that are in the institute and the level 2 containment facility we have. We are now helping the local hospitals do clinical trials. We will also set up an antibody lab and will soon have a level 3 containment lab, which we already had, but it had to be recertified by Health Canada to do antiviral research with live human viruses.
The fact that we were able to react quickly is due to the government-financed infrastructure of personnel and equipment for fundamental science, such as biochemistry, genetics and so on. I would like to underline that without this, we would not have been able to react so quickly.
The positive aspect, if there is anything positive to say about COVID-19, is how quickly researchers in universities have come together to collaborate and to respond to the new CIHR funding line that has been offered. I can give many examples. Colleagues of mine from McGill University are collaborating with people from Alberta and people from Université Laval with others across the country. It brings scientists together like nothing before. It's really nice to see.
On the other hand, whereas many in the scientific community were preparing for the CIHR spring competition, we have noticed that CIHR has cancelled that competition. When we were ready to evaluate the already-submitted grants, I was on a panel and was notified that the spring competition had been cancelled. As a society, our members and my colleagues are very worried that this will do damage to early career researchers because they have put in their first grant application and are worried about how to finance their research. It is to be noted that Canada is the only country to have a major national financing agency cancel its competitions for funding health research. We worry that this is at the expense of other health research that will still be necessary after the pandemic is over. Cancer research and cardiovascular and diabetes research and many other problems need attention.
We appreciate the quick response of the CIHR, but we would like to underline that we need to maintain support for health research at the same level or an even higher level after the COVID-19 pandemic is over.
As I said, the excellent infrastructure that we have in Canada and the funding have enabled us to respond quickly. This is very paradigmatic.
However, even before the pandemic, there were warning signs that Canada's commitment to its researchers was starting to slip behind that of other countries, and I just want to give a few numbers here.
Canada is only spending 1.5% of its GDP on research and development, whereas the OECD average is around 2.4%. We as a society pointed that out in meetings with members of Parliament and other persons on the Hill early this year. We are no longer in the top 20 countries, and we are lagging behind countries such as the Czech Republic and Slovenia in terms of total research intensity.
Our first recommendation—and I would like to give three recommendations to the Canadian government or to this committee—is that the government enact policies and programs to get our funding on health and research up to the OECD average of 2.4% of the GDP.
We also recognize that in budget 2018 the Canadian government made significant investments in research, following the recommendations of a report of a panel that the government itself established, the fundamental science review, and this was very welcome. However, for fundamental research, I would like to cite one number. It only put into place 60% of what was recommended by the panel and the fundamental science review, putting in place $708 million over four years in budget 2018, while the fundamental science review panel recommended $1.2 billion over four years.
Our second recommendation would be to follow the guidelines of this panel—the Naylor report or the Naylor panel, the fundamental science review—and install $500 million over the next four years to maintain health research at a highly competitive level to keep Canada ready for health challenges that certainly may come.
Finally, our third recommendation is that we believe it is essential to collect data on a wide range of demographics. We have already seen that the pandemic plays out differently in different areas of Canada. We need to ensure that we collect information and data on how different demographics across the country are experiencing the pandemic differently, both to inform our response and other global health crises to come. The data should be collected through a multidisciplinary approach enlisting our social scientists, bioethicists and more to ensure that we gather the breadth of our research, that we quite appropriately analyze how Canadians were affected by the pandemic and how we were effective in our response.
Thank you very much for this invitation. Again, I'd be happy to answer your questions and I look forward to them.