Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I will not take the full ten minutes.
My thanks to the committee for the opportunity to appear before you. I am appearing with our vice-president for external and government relations, Suzanne Corbeil.
This is the 21st appearance by the CFI before a committee of Parliament since its creation in 1997. Today I want to talk to you about CFI's role in helping to secure Canada's future prosperity and competitiveness, in the context of your study of the challenges facing the Canadian manufacturing sector.
In your interim report of June 2006, you identified five principal challenges facing the manufacturing sector in Canada. My remarks today will focus on the CFI's role in addressing two of these challenges, namely, competition from emerging economies and the development of skilled labour.
The challenges we face as a nation in the 21st century are well known, particularly an aging population and increasingly intense international competition. In the face of these challenges, Canada cannot afford to slip in this global race.
In broad terms, Canada's prosperity in the 21st century will depend on our capacity as a nation to innovate, to generate new knowledge and ideas and translate them into products, services, processes, and policies that will create wealth, enhance our social foundations and improve the quality of life. In short, Canada must become a nation of innovation.
Innovative societies are increasingly characterized by three elements: first, a cutting-edge research enterprise; second, a highly educated and skilled workforce; and third, a business, regulatory, and social environment that encourages entrepreneurship and creative thinking.
The Canada Foundation for Innovation, CFI, is playing a major role in Canada's evolution into a nation of innovation by enhancing the capacity of Canada' s research enterprise, by providing state-of-the-art infrastructure required for the training of highly qualified personnel--that is, the human infrastructure that is the most important resource, renewable or otherwise, in a knowledge-based economy--and by promoting the development of technology clusters through collaborations between public research institutions and the private sector.
Nine years into its mandate, CFI has committed $3 billion to 4,700 research infrastructure projects at 128 institutions in 62 municipalities across the country. Included in these investments is more than $153 million in support of 230 cutting-edge research projects in a wide range of manufacturing sectors, including forestry, automotive, aerospace, biotechnology, and nanotechnology, to name but a few. The details are provided in the appendices.
Our strategic investments are made on the basis of a rigorous assessment of merit using international standards to determine the potential of the projects to increase the capacity of Canadian universities, colleges, research hospitals, and non-profit research institutions to compete internationally and to produce knowledge that will benefit all Canadians.
The results of CFI's investments have been transformative. If I had stood before this committee in 1996 and declared that a decade from now Saskatoon would be home to a state-of-the-art synchrotron, Canada's biggest science project in a generation; that Chicoutimi would be a world leader in developing de-icing technology for commercial use on airplane wings and hydroelectric wires around the world; that St. Mary's University in Nova Scotia would be a recognized leader in astrophysics; and that Montreal's McGill University would be internationally recognized for the development of groundbreaking technologies that allow scientists to identify the genetic basis of human diseases--if I had stood here and told you all of those and many other predictions, the reaction would likely have been one of disbelief. But I am pleased to report that a decade later, in 2006, all of the advances l've described are a reality, in large part due to investments made by the CFI.
By 2010 the total capital investment in research infrastructure by CFI, the research institutions, and their partners will collectively exceed $11 billion. These investments are creating jobs and are leading to innovative solutions in some of today's most important and exciting areas of investigation, from advanced materials to pharmaceuticals, renewable energy, high performance computing, advanced manufacturing, and early childhood education, as examples.
Furthermore, the discoveries are moving from the laboratory to the marketplace. Spinoff companies are being created to supply highly demanded technology, particularly in the bio-tech, communications, aerospace, and other related industries, and highly qualified personnel are being trained for careers in both the public and private sectors.
Last summer, however, CFI launched its last major competition, with the decisions to be announced over the next two months. Thereafter, our capacity to invest in cutting-edge research going forward will be largely depleted. Unless it is known well in advance that additional funding will be available after this last competition, the institutions, universities, and colleges will find it increasingly difficult to undertake the planning of infrastructure projects whose design and construction might span several years. As a result, Canada will begin to lose its hard-earned competitive advantage in public sector R and D.
As mentioned, innovation is dependent on the generation of new knowledge and ideas from research that eventually lead to economic health and social benefits for society at large. At times, however, the link between knowledge creation and technology development is not immediately apparent, and yet understandably governments, which invest considerably in public sector research, often seek evidence that their investments have yielded appropriate returns.
Such evidence can be derived from several studies of the economic impact of investments in research. As one example, and there are several I could cite, in a landmark study of over 100,000 industrial technologies that were patented in the United States in 1993-94, the study found that 73% of the science citations involved in these private sector patents originated from research conducted in public institutions, largely universities. Only 27% of the citations originated in industry-conducted research.
I'm quite sure the data for Canadian industrial patents would be very similar. In fact, many of the citations in those U.S. patent applications were to research done in Canada.
However, the process of knowledge transfer, which is what we're talking about, is not simply a matter of the acquisition of intellectual property by the private sector. Rather, the transfer requires a close working relationship between the public and the private sectors, a relationship that ultimately involves the free movement of people and ideas between the two domains.
This interplay between the supply forces of science and the demand forces of the marketplace greatly facilitates knowledge transfer and its eventual commercialization. As has often been said, tech transfer is a contact sport.
CFI promotes the process of knowledge transfer by enhancing the development of local and regional technology clusters that bring together the industrial, financial, and academic enterprises and their respective talent pools. We do it because such clusters often coalesce around infrastructure facilities or specialized technologies.
In so doing, CFI is helping to ensure that universities and colleges play a critical role in the sustainable development, both social and economic, of communities across Canada, large and small, and thereby contribute to Canada's prosperity and competitiveness.
In conclusion, by investing in leading-edge research throughout Canada, by supporting world-class expertise in universities and other research institutions, by putting in place the right conditions to attract and retain top-quality researchers in Canada, and by training young Canadians for the knowledge-based economy—by doing all of these things—we are ensuring that Canada will become a nation of innovation, one that will compete successfully in the global knowledge economy and that will ultimately bring benefits to all Canadians. We owe it to future generations to maintain this commitment.
Thank you.