Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Hewitt, I was listening to you earlier and I fully understood your comments about the gap between invention and innovation. There is certainly something to be said about the importance of training and of resources, as well as the importance of having a strategy on how our resources must be used.
I am not sure if Canada really has the best leaders to do that. Certainly, we are missing something. Let me read to you from an article in the Globe and Mail. It reads:
Canada is falling behind global leaders in R&D....
Let me quote the Globe and Mail again.
Canada is the only developed country with an intellectual property deficit—meaning we spend more to acquire other peoples’ technology than the world buys from us—
That's maybe a point.
And most disappointingly, the private sector continues to underinvest, in spite of repeated warnings about the consequences. Business spending on R&D stands at 0.88 per cent of GDP, near the bottom among OECD countries.
I would like to hear more from you about this, because it seems there’s no obvious sense of urgency. Maybe that's the problem here. That's probably something we should do.
I'll give you an example from the article:
Taiwan, which spent half of what Canada did in 2002, now tops this country by nearly $3-billion a year.
There's probably something that should be done about this.