Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
HealthCareCAN is an organization that represents Canadian research hospitals, regional health authorities and health organizations. My thanks to the committee members for the opportunity to present to you today with my colleague, Dr. Brad Wouters, of UHN, with whom I will split HealthCareCAN's presentation time.
The research community, regional authorities and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research actively contributed to the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 crisis has already exposed the gaps in the public health system, and the health care system more broadly. One of those gaps is the fact that Canadian health care facilities, designed for another time and place, are among the oldest public infrastructure in use today, with approximately 48% of facilities being over 50 years old. The picture in bigger cities is even worse, where 69% of health care institutions are over 50 years old.
Our hospitals are facing enormous budget constraints, which very often force them to postpone important maintenance work that is sorely needed to ensure quality patient care. We haven't adequately funded the maintenance of our health care facilities.
Once COVID-19 is behind us, we must complete the unfinished business of medicare by closing the gaps in long-term care and our traditional institutional health care system. As health care leaders now turn to addressing the backlog created by the huge numbers of cases and procedures delayed in the face of the pandemic, our focus must be on the building of surge capacity into our health care. This will require much more strategic support from the federal government as we work to addressing the coming surge of patients waiting for different types of care due to COVID-19.
Another area of deep concern for Canada's health care organization is the very fragile state of Canada's health research enterprise. Much of Canada's health research talent is employed by research institutes based in health care facilities. That talent drives a $3-billion annual sector of our economy, employing nearly 60,000 highly skilled researchers and staff nationwide. This not-for-profit sector accounts for the majority of the biomedical research that is conducted in Canada, including current essential research and clinical trials around COVID-19.
Hospital-based research drives improvements in disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment and care for Canadians. Here are two examples. Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute has nine major centres, known internationally for their research excellence. It employs over 1,500 personnel engaged in research, 900 principal investigators, and graduate and post-graduate training conducting clinical and discovery sciences. The other example is the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre, which is also world renowned, with over 1,200 graduate and post-graduate trainees, and 440 researchers and staff. It is recognized for groundbreaking work relating to health outcomes in transplantation, infectious diseases and patient self-monitoring applications, among many others.
That workforce is paid through a combination of public and private research grants, charitable donations, allotments from foundations, and contracts for clinical trials which are almost all funded privately by biotech and pharmaceutical companies. That revenue base has all but evaporated in view of the COVID-19 pandemic. All research and clinical trials not related to COVID-19 have been either suspended or cancelled, with severe implications for the sector's capacity to employ essential research staff and contribute crucial research toward improving Canadians' health outcomes.
The health research institutes welcomed the announcement of the Canada emergency wage subsidy, but they were very disappointed to learn that, under Bill C-14, they wouldn't have access to it.