Mr. Chair, thank you for the opportunity to speak today.
As Paul-Émile mentioned, on March 15, nearly all hospital-based, non-COVID-related research across Canada was suspended. At that time, our organization had budgeted $460 million for our hospital's research operations for the fiscal year, a sum which employs 1,000 scientists and 4,000 other highly skilled research staff, including clinical research associates, research nurses, laboratory technicians, biostatisticians, data managers, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows.
Our organization is the largest research hospital in Canada. It is one of the top centres in the world. It includes the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, ranked in the top five cancer centres in the world. It also includes the Toronto General Hospital, ranked this year by Newsweek as the fourth best hospital in the entire world.
We perform more organ transplants than any hospital in North America. We have over a century of research accomplishments that include the development and application of insulin to treat diabetes and the discovery of stem cells. But never in our history has our research future been more at risk than it is today.
The majority of our industry revenue has been lost because the clinical trials and research projects they support have been suspended. Charities, as you've heard today, have also begun to cut their giving, resulting in forecasted losses of revenue for our institution alone of more than $10 million per month. We have managed to stretch our resources for the past seven weeks without job action and layoffs in hopes that the federal government would provide us access to support programs like the Canada emergency wage subsidy.
We operate in an extremely competitive environment with other health academic medical centres around the world. It has been important for us to keep our staff engaged, part of our institute and ready to relaunch and compete for funds when we come back.
Many of our researchers and scientists have also jumped in and contributed to a rapid response to COVID-19, bringing their unique skills and talents to the treatment and prevention of this disease. We have launched new clinical trials in patients. We are exploring the fundamental biology of the virus and we are developing new vaccines and therapies. However, 80% of our staff remain unable to continue essential research into cancer, lung disease, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, rare diseases, diabetes and many other key diseases that kill the majority of Canadians.
Since our suspension, we have had numerous contacts with officials in several government departments. All of them have been extremely responsive and understanding of the situation we are in. We have asked to have the same opportunities as other businesses and not-for-profits, but have been excluded from these key programs because we are located inside a public hospital.
On May 1, we were forced to begin the process to identify roughly 1,500 staff for a first round of job layoffs because of the suspension-induced loss of revenue. If we continue to be unable to access these federal supports, we will face large end-of-year operating deficits, additional layoffs and insufficient revenues to support our cause.
Honourable members, institutions like mine all across the country are currently ineligible for the wage subsidy based largely on a technicality. Because these health research institutes are physically based in public hospitals they are designated as public institutions and are excluded from eligibility.
Our hospital and the care of patients is funded by the provincial ministry of health. However, we are legislatively prohibited from using any of that provincial support for our research. Instead our research is funded by a wide mix of over 900 different organizations. For the most part we are not funded out of public sources. To the extent that those funds do come from public sources through competitive research or innovation grants these have also stalled since March.
I would also mention that eligibility for these programs would come at a marginal cost to the government. The staff, if we are forced to lay off, will have access to the Canada emergency response benefit, but it is clear that it would be much more effective to keep those employees part of our organization. If we are forced to lay off that staff, they will be unproductive. They will be unable to contribute to COVID-19 research, and we will be at risk of losing them. This jeopardizes our ability to restart research and to compete for international industry and other funding when we come back.
Without urgent support from the federal government, we run the risk of setting back health research in Canada by decades and undermining patient outcomes in Canada in the future.