Industry and Technology Committee on Dec. 1st, 2025

[Fred Meier]

I'll go back to the research capacity. At 3% of the overall funding available, I think when you look at us compared to OECD countries that focus on applied research, our investment on the applied side is well below where others are that have very strong productivity.

The first thing I would say is that we need to find a way of increasing the investment in the applied research institutions going forward. We're going to learn a lot out of this initiative on Labs4 about the ability to work with universities and others to create a much cleaner pathway for researchers who have discovery research to move through a very supportive network. Part of that is about providing them funding in the early stage. If you're a recent graduate or a researcher, you have to think about getting by with day-to-day life as well, so it's about providing stipends and supports for them to cultivate research into something that's available.

It's about the strong network of supports—not only investing on the research side at the front end in applied research, but also investing in researchers as they're commercializing their products.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Thank you very much. That's very helpful and very enlightening.

Ms. Knowles, thank you again for your presentation. In your last answer, you talked about indirect benefits, if I understood correctly. I'd like to know whether, in saying that, you've thought about indirect jobs in SMEs and communities or whether you've included health benefits, which are harder to capture financially, but are very present.

[Natalie Knowles]

It's both. The more qualitative aspects of the economic impact—the indirect economic factors, like the small local businesses, the resources staying within communities and the support for rural economies—are massive for our sector. We're predominantly seeing the benefits and the source of outdoor recreation economies in rural communities across Canada. It's about providing benefits in areas that are struggling in other sectors, especially with some of the transitions away from natural resource extraction industries.

At the same time, the productivity and indirect benefits—the social and health benefits—are massive for all Canadians, and that trickles down throughout our workforce and throughout our productivity across other sectors and our labour force in general. Having a healthy, strong, happy, mentally strong workforce is hugely beneficial to individual Canadians, to all of our communities and to all of our businesses. Our economy is built from all of those things.

It starts from the base of making sure that Canadians are healthy and happy, and outdoor recreation really provides that across the board. It's such a diverse thing. It transcends political backgrounds and all the dimensions of diversity.

It impacts all Canadians. About 80% of Canadians report participating in outdoor recreation. It's a key piece of our culture as well. The diversity means that there are opportunities for it to impact any Canadian, whether it's somebody walking on a trail or somebody mountain biking down a crazy mountain. It has an impact and is beneficial for everybody, so it can provide a uniting piece and can build productivity from the workforce level.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thank you, Mr. Ste‑Marie.

Mr. Guglielmin, the floor is yours for five minutes.

[Michael Guglielmin, Conservative, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to both witnesses for your testimony.

Mr. Meier, I'm going to start with you.

We're at the end of our productivity and capital flight study, and the theme we've been hearing over and over again is that we're in a productivity crisis in Canada. Could you provide the committee with your thoughts on the major contributors to our current state of productivity?

[Fred Meier]

I've touched on some of the aspects of applied research and of actually funding applied research so we can advance productivity, but I'm going to turn my attention a bit more to the skills mismatch that I think the country is faced with right now.

As the committee has likely heard, we're one of the leaders in the OECD when it comes to post-secondary attainment. What we're finding, though, and what I hear routinely from those looking for talent and skills, is that there is a mismatch. There's a mismatch between those applying for positions and their ability to actually be ready for work. By that I mean those who actually have the work skills and are able to plug right in and help industry.

Part of that is work-integrated learning, which we're hearing about a lot. We're hearing a lot about the need to have students with experience come through the system. It's a hallmark of what we do in polytechnics and colleges inside Canada. We've done this for a long time, through either work placements or internships, as I said before, or through capstone projects where students work on actual projects from industry. I don't think we're getting the number of people we need at the doors of polytechnics and colleges soon enough in their learning journey.

We're seeing that the average age of learners at our doors is mid-to-late twenties. That means, when we dig into it, they have some other post-secondary learning inside our country. They've gone somewhere else, to a university, for example, and then when they're looking for employment—a stronger employment outcome—they come to the doors of polytechnics and colleges.

Other countries have been quite successful at reducing the average age, finding a short-circuit. We could tell the story within Canada that if you go to a college or polytechnic, your education is going to connect you to employment. You're going to have the skills necessary to do that.

For too long, we have said there isn't parity of esteem between educational outcomes, that one type of education has a stronger outcome than another. They're both equally important, and we have to stand both up equally. We need policies to be developed based on the parity of esteem. We need investment to follow that as well so we can have people ready.

Statistics are showing that youth unemployment for people with bachelor's degrees is far exceeding that of those who graduate with a college or polytechnic education—vocational types of education—and that gap is widening. If we're thinking about doing things like nation-building projects, the people for those projects, the people we're going to need to advance that type of work, are exactly the types of people coming out of our institutions.

[Michael Guglielmin, Conservative, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Polytechnics Canada reports that about 50% of industry partners that engage with institutions like yours see tangible benefits from the partnership.

I'm wondering if you could provide the committee with a clear example of an industry partnership with Red River where the company saw some benefit to its productivity or output.

[Fred Meier]

I'll use an example I didn't speak about earlier.

The aerospace industry is a large industry in Manitoba. We have a long history of that. Magellan Aerospace, a long-standing defence contractor and aerospace company, has worked quite closely with us. One of the projects we work closely with them on is advanced composite manufacturing. This is exactly the story I told you about.

The NRC developed some research around advanced composites. That was bench research. We've taken it into our facility and worked with Magellan Aerospace on advanced composite-forming products. That's now at the point where it will be implemented on one of their aircraft. It's going to increase their development of the product with fewer defects in it, and it's going to reduce their turnaround immensely. It will give them the ability to procure other types of contracts into that facility, including global contracts.

When we talk about how to increase productivity per unit of labour, that's an exact example of a company in Manitoba that has reduced amount of time and increased product quality based on working in our facility.

[Michael Guglielmin, Conservative, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thank you, Mr. Guglielmin.

Mr. Bains, the floor is yours for five minutes.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Richmond East—Steveston, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for joining us today.

I'm going to begin with Ms. Knowles.

You spoke a lot about active living and how it can contribute to productivity. My hometown of Richmond, British Columbia, was recently the recipient of the most active city award from Participaction. We also have the longest life expectancy in Canada.

In the budget, we announced the build communities strong fund, which amounts to about $3 billion a year for the next 10 years. Where do you think those funds should be directed? Do you believe active living facilities should be a focus of those funds? Should applications for those funds coming from municipalities ensure there is, as you're saying, a direct correlation between active living and productivity?

[Natalie Knowles]

Absolutely.

It's a very exciting piece of funding that's come out. Active living and specifically access to nature have been proven to be really beneficial for productivity. PaRx, an initiative out of the BC Parks Foundation, driven by health care, is pushing for providing prescriptions for outdoor recreation, specifically in nature. It's about providing green space, access to trails and different sorts of low-impact outdoor recreation. It's a really low-capital-intensive way to provide equitable access to all Canadians to outdoor recreation.

We have incredible natural spaces. Something as simple as supporting trail networks, green spaces and areas that people can access without difficulty via public transit can do exactly that—provide productivity enhancements by creating a healthy, resilient workforce. Physical and mental health and social well-being are.... Significant research exists on these points, and it's continuing to come out in health benefits. We're seeing integration among outdoor recreation, productivity and our health care systems. Health care providers increasingly integrate nature and outdoor recreation into their—

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Richmond East—Steveston, BC]

Thank you.

I'm going to switch over to Mr. Meier.

I spent some time teaching as an instructor in applied communications at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Richmond, British Columbia. It offers several areas of research. The campus in Richmond offers the Applied Genomics Centre, the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems, research services in proposal preparation and other areas as well.

Here is my question for you. We've seen a considerable drop in enrolment, of course, with some of the changes in the immigration levels for international students. How do we attract domestic students? Is there an opportunity to increase collaboration?

You may have noted that a piece in the budget talks about skills training and upgrading skills, with a partnership through unions. Maybe there are others in private industry I recently visited the BCIT marine and machine campus on Annacis Island. There, we saw those in private industry, like Snap-on tools, contributing to classrooms by donating tools.

I want to talk about the collaboration from industry and how we attract the next generation of students to maybe re-establish a respect for trades or skilled trades. Can you talk a bit about that?

[Fred Meier]

I'll touch on recruitment first, which is always on our minds. It was, I would say, even before the international student changes.

I'll speak from our perspective. RRC Polytech has seen an increase in domestic enrolment over the last few years. Year over year, we're somewhere between 8% and 10%, depending on the last year we're at. It's been very strong, especially coming out of the pandemic.

I think the key to increasing recruitment is speaking more about the types of careers and type of education you can have in a college or polytechnic. I don't think we talk about that enough. I think there's a default way we think about polytechnics and colleges and the careers that come out of them. A lot of times people still look at them in the same way as their origins. They were trade schools and you would leave in a trade.

What we don't talk about right now is that we have machine learning and data science programs that are at the core of artificial intelligence. In Winnipeg, we have video game programming and a video game design program. That's at the heart of an industry that's growing rapidly. We have engineering technologists who work on robotics and automation.

In this country, in the way we think of our narrative, we're thinking about the education and careers that come out of these schools as not modern or digital.

I just went through an HVAC program the other day. A lot of people would be shocked by the number of digital sensors and amount of equipment they have to use and the high level of skill associated with that. These are digital skills. These are the future skills people are graduating with.

On industry investment, we have strong industry partners. They're in it because they want to attract more graduates, and they know there are fees associated with that, so they're moving forward and partnering on that front. We have deep partnerships with many.

It still is a heavy lift. There's still a significant gap. Also, we know that in colleges and polytechnics across the country, the change in international students has had a dramatic impact—for us as well. However, we have very strong partnerships, because they're attracting the talent directly out of our institutions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thank you very much, Mr. Bains.

Mr. Ste‑Marie, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Knowles, can you give us a little more detail on how outdoor recreation and tourism can be used as a lever for sustainable socio-economic development and provide some examples?

[Natalie Knowles]

The outdoor recreation sector in the U.S. was in the same state as ours—very disconnected. There were a lot of diverse subsectors that were not working together and didn't have a full understanding of the economic impact of the sector. They've come together in the same way that we are, organizing to bring the outdoor recreation sector together.

It's diverse in terms of activity and it's diverse across our nation rurally, in urban centres and across provinces. We're bringing this sector together and really accounting for the economic impact, as has been done in the U.S. with the support of their federal government through their Bureau of Economic Analysis, similar to Stats Canada. Our outdoor recreation sector includes aspects of tourism, but not completely. It's a sector that overlaps, but outdoor recreation, as I've mentioned before, has a greater impact for Canadians and Canadian businesses and for the Canadian workforce and economy.

The more we can account for what our outdoor recreation economy fully encapsulates, what the impacts are and where the impacts are across Canada, the better we can invest, create policies that support it, and direct funding, as our last questioner just mentioned, into ways that can support productivity across our entire workforce.

We can have a better, more detailed understanding of our outdoor recreation economy. What we've done is had a preliminary look, and what we see is really exciting. It's a massive sector. It's really comparable with other sectors that are facing political, economic or environmental challenges, and ours is seeing growth through all of that, and growth within our country. The more we can understand the sector, the more we can direct policy and funding to better support the sector itself, as well as support productivity, the workforce and Canadians and communities across our country.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thank you very much, Mr. Ste‑Marie.

Mr. Falk, the floor is yours for five minutes.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for your testimony here at the committee this morning.

Mr. Meier, I'd like to begin with some questions for you. It's good to see you again. Welcome to the committee.

You briefly alluded to the Technology Access Centre for Aerospace and Manufacturing in replying to my colleague's previous question. You have a couple of those centres of excellence.

Can you explain the positive benefits of that programming in contributing towards productivity and entrepreneurship in the industry by building a talent base in Canada? Can you also briefly talk about whether we're losing the talent pool of graduates to the United States or they're staying domestically?

[Fred Meier]

We have three technical access centres. I've mentioned the building efficiency one and the Prairie Research Kitchen, which is our food one. The other one is our technical access centre for advanced manufacturing and aerospace, which is one of our longer-standing ones. What that technical access centre does is provide funding for us to have researchers with industry experience inside of it who can work with our manufacturing sector or our aerospace sector.

I mentioned one of them earlier. Magellan Aerospace is accessing the facilities, the equipment and the researchers we have in that area, but there are many small manufacturers—and this is a piece that I want to focus on—that don't have the internal capacity or the funding to advance product development and that are looking for an ability to move that forward. In fact, when we did our Price Institute of Advanced Manufacturing and Mechatronics survey of industry, many of them were SMEs. There was one comment that really captured it for me. That one comment was, “We just need an easy button.” For an SME that has maybe 30 or 40 employees, it's, “We just need an easy button on research, innovation and prototyping. Deliver that for us.”

We're not an easy button, but we're a part of that, in my mind. We have the facilities. We have the equipment. We just don't have the necessary resources to meet all of the demand out there right now. The biggest fear we have is that the competition in the marketplace is very fierce and the disruption because of technologies right now is large as well, and we're not sure that SMEs actually have the capacity necessary to do that. That's one piece.

You've talked about the flight of talent. I would say that in our institutions, the flight of talent isn't as great. The reason for that is a point I mentioned earlier. We have deep integration with industry. The reason people leave, I would say, is mostly employment opportunities. Most of our students have multiple opportunities directly, before graduating.

We just recently had a career fair. Every large company was there looking for talent among our students. I would say that we don't have the flight risk of talent that perhaps others do because of our strong integration with industry and because of work experience very early on. Many of our students don't even hit the job market. They're scooped up by those working with them right now.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Meier. That pretty well brings my time to a close, but I want to acknowledge the tremendously good work you're doing through Red River. You have a facility and campus in my riding of Provencher. I know it's very well supported by the community, and you produce excellent graduates.

Mr. Chair, I'd like to cede the rest of my time to Ms. Dancho.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to move that we resume debate on the motion we put forward last Wednesday.

Mr. Chair, I have quite a bit to say about the Liberal amendment, but in the spirit of collaboration, I can pause my remarks and we can pick up with me after we're done with witnesses, or I can go into it now. I'll put the question to you before I cede the floor.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

I have a couple of things to say, colleagues.

The first is that the witnesses were, my gut tells me, about to embark on a few minutes' worth of discussions. Given that there was only five minutes of questioning left, it would probably be fair to the time they have left in their day to do productive things—no pun intended—to let them go now.

I want to thank you very much, Mr. Meier and Ms. Knowles, for appearing before us today. We appreciate your testimony and wish you a good rest of your day.

Colleagues, there's been a little confusion about where we go at this point, so I just want to clarify that.

Ms. Dancho, just so that I'm clear, is this the auto sector motion you're referring to? Okay.

We had a motion put forward related to the auto sector. An amendment by Monsieur Ste-Marie altering the original motion was adopted. Then there was an amendment proposed by Mr. Noormohamed, who was subbing in at the committee at that point.

We will now resume the motion and the proposed amendment put forward by Mr. Noormohamed. In other words, we will begin debate on this motion, but it is not on the original motion as amended by the Bloc. We are now on the amendment put forward by Mr. Noormohamed.

I just want to verify with the clerk that we have the language of it. I can't remember if it was circulated or not. The amendment wasn't.

Okay, colleagues, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to suspend briefly in a moment because we need to work off that language. It happened really quickly at the end...and if it hasn't been distributed yet, that's important for us, because I don't know the specific language we're working from. You have to give me a moment on that.

Madam Dancho has not ceded the floor. I'm seeing hands go up. Are these points of order or are they simply to get onto the speaking list? Okay. I have Mr. Bardeesy followed by Madam O'Rourke, and Madam Dancho will have the floor once we come back from the suspension.