Thank you very much for the invitation to appear and talk about Environment Canada's science. I do have a written statement, which I'm not going to read. I'll just give some of the highlights of the statement.
Environment Canada, like a couple of the other departments at the table here, but not like some others, is primarily a regulatory department, although we do provide services to Canadians, such as weather service. Our science is aligned towards the needs of the department and, to a certain extent, because environment is a shared jurisdiction in Canada, to the needs of the provinces as well. Although there may be several reasons why the federal government would support and do science, including economic benefit or the advancement of knowledge, the primary motivation for Environment Canada is in health sciences, quality of life, the decisions the government makes, and the services we provide to Canadians.
I just wanted to emphasize that, because there are several roles for the federal government in science, and we have focused our science within the department on the role Environment Canada plays, as opposed to the advancement of knowledge, which is another group's business.
Another feature of our department is something we call related science activities. It's important to separate, in our view, research and development activities from what we call related science activities, because two-thirds of the science in Environment Canada falls within the category of related science activities. We have 3,500 employees in science and $600 million in expenditures. Two-thirds of those are in related science activities and one-third in research and development.
To give you an example, related science activities would be the analysis of climate data or temperature, etc., to produce weather reports. Environment Canada, of course, produces weather reports across the country. The meteorologists who do that have science backgrounds, science qualifications, but they do not do research and development.
Similarly, we have a large community. We work in partnership with my colleague to my right to do risk assessments and risk management under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, for example. We have a large community of risk assessors and risk managers. All of them have scientific qualifications, but they do not do research and development. For us, it's important to draw that distinction. We employ scientists doing science who don't do research. In fact, two-thirds of the science community in Environment Canada, 2,400 people, fall within that category.
With respect to our research and development, we do research and development within the department. We have three broad goals. Our program itself, unlike the management of people, which we separate, is managed through a results framework with three priority boards: an environmental protection board, where our risk management and risk assessment take place; an ecosystem sustainability board; and the weather and environmental systems board. All three of those boards establish our broad results and our priorities, and the science is managed as a component of that rather than as a science program separate from the results. The scientific priorities set within each of those have broad results areas and are managed that way and are resourced through those boards.
Second, the point I'd like to raise is that we have scientists across the country. I don't know if during your visit to Saskatoon you visited our facility on the campus there, the National Hydrology Research Centre. We have scientists located at 35 locations across the country, many located in universities, where they work in strong collaboration. Our science, because it's focused on results and not on the generation of knowledge per se, requires us to make some priority decisions and to rely on collaborators outside, who do more broad general research, curiosity-driven research, which informs us. The strategy we have employed to do that is to establish collaborations. Most of our scientists are adjunct professors at universities. So we pursue these collaborations.
The other thing I'd like to draw to your attention is that Environment Canada is in fact the hub of Canada's environmental research network. We've done some metrics. With respect to peer-reviewed scientific publications, the environmental research literature, we are the most productive institution in Canada and we rank seventh globally. With respect to other organizations who collaborate, ten of the other fourteen most productive Canadian institutions collaborate with Environment Canada scientists. As I said, we work very closely in collaboration with other departments, etc.
My final point would be that because we manage people different from our results management system, we've produced a science plan about the way science is managed in Environment Canada. It's available on our website--and it's certainly available to this committee--and it talks about our broad, long-term directions.
Thank you very much.