Thank you, Howard.
Like Howard, I am very pleased to be with you today. I feel that the work of the members of this committee is very important for the present and the future of Canada.
It's an honour to come and present before you and talk to you about this new national initiative and also to see democracy working so well.
As Howard said,
I am going to speak briefly about one of the council's initiatives.
This is our Science, Technology and Innovation Council state of the nation report. Indeed, if you think about one of the big questions facing Canada right now, and if you believe, as certainly our gifted chair and the members of the council do, that science, technology, and innovation are at the heart of the future success of the country, it's important for us to know how Canada is actually doing in this domain. I'm sure as members of a committee you often wonder exactly that, as you have to deliberate on the important questions about our science, technology, and innovation programs and policies.
So the state of the nation report is one of the major initiatives being undertaken by the council in the first year of its mandate. The idea here is to create what will be a cyclical report, a public report that will serve to help us to benchmark Canada's science, technology, and innovation performance both against its own progress at year over year, but maybe most importantly, against the progress of the nations with which we both compete and collaborate worldwide. I think it has been well demonstrated that we have no benefit from science, technology, and innovation at the local level if this is not science, technology, and innovation that is recognized worldwide as having a quality and an impact that ranks with the very best in the world.
So the council has set to work, with me and Peter MacKinnon working with a group of the council, in the first instance, to develop a framework, which we will discuss at our meetings today and tomorrow, that will lay out key dimensions of performance that we feel will be very important for all sectors—government, universities and research institutes, and the private sector—both to understand how well we're doing against the competition worldwide, how well we're doing against our own progress over time, and to formulate recommendations related to areas of strength and weakness to build up our capacity and our impact, as I said at the beginning, for local benefit via worldwide recognition of our excellence and impact.
I'll stop there. Thank you, Chair.