Evidence of meeting #138 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was forward.
A video is available from Parliament.
3:55 p.m.
David de Burgh Graham Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.
Thank you.
I have a few different subjects to dive into, but we will start with this one.
Vote 1a has a $1.2-million reinvestment of royalties from intellectual property. As you know, we're talking about copyright a lot here and Crown corporation issues come up a little bit, but not a lot. Is there any connection between this and Crown copyright? What is the source of this revenue and what is it about?
November 19th, 2018 / 3:55 p.m.
Philippe Thompson Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Management Sector, Department of Industry
The $1.2 million is for intellectual property from the CRC, the Communications Research Centre. They have $200,000 that they get from royalties from projects they have run. The other one is the new program at Corporations Canada, and it's the remainder of the funds. I think it's a little more than $1 million.
3:55 p.m.
Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Management Sector, Department of Industry
It's for the program used when you are interrogating the database on the names of corporations in Canada. They get royalties from that program.
3:55 p.m.
Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.
Okay. On the $200,000, what kinds of programs are they recovering that money from?
3:55 p.m.
Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Management Sector, Department of Industry
These are royalties they are getting from charges from the system, so it's the intellectual property for having developed the system in-house.
3:55 p.m.
Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.
You mentioned also a reference to CanCode. From what I understand, Kids Code Jeunesse has met or completed all of its targets so far. Can anybody give me an update on how CanCode is going, and whether all of you can now code?
3:55 p.m.
Deputy Minister, Department of Industry
We're still working on the coding part, but Éric Dagenais is the leader on CanCode.
3:55 p.m.
Éric Dagenais Assistant Deputy Minister, Industry Sector, Department of Industry
Sure. The initial target was to teach 500,000 kids how to code, and we're on track to actually double that target and hit one million by March 31, 2019.
3:55 p.m.
Assistant Deputy Minister, Industry Sector, Department of Industry
The 22 organizations through which we are delivering CanCode are meeting with great success.
I still can't code, though.
3:55 p.m.
Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.
So it hasn't reached complete success yet.
3:55 p.m.
Assistant Deputy Minister, Industry Sector, Department of Industry
I'm not a kid.
3:55 p.m.
Voices
Oh, oh!
3:55 p.m.
Deputy Minister, Department of Industry
More broadly, though, I think the department is putting a great deal of emphasis on STEM initiatives, including for women, and of course, coding. I know the minister would want to emphasize this if he were here. It's not just about, strictly speaking, doing coding. It's actually achieving objectives in terms of the STEM education. That really is our intent, with respect to CanCode as well.
4 p.m.
Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.
I'm not sure you can answer this, but do you have a sense of how many coders are missing now in society? I've said this before. Twenty years ago, when I was learning to code—and I can code.... In my generation, we were in our basements with our trench coats on, with our long hair, coding and taking our computers apart and putting them back together. Now we have these iPads—I still have a BlackBerry; everyone else has iPhones—that you can't take apart and see inside how they work.
4 p.m.
Deputy Minister, Department of Industry
Again, I'm not an expert coder, by any means, but I think that at this current point in time, there is a great deal of demand for coders, exactly as you described. I think the question is whether, in the long run, there will still be, strictly speaking, coding that's required. For example, in the context of artificial intelligence and the applications that are possible, what coders will do in the future could change significantly, and the emphasis may be that you actually need capabilities and skills or competencies that are broader than just coding related to STEM.
4 p.m.
Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.
As any programmer will tell you, no program is better than the person who wrote it, either.
4 p.m.
Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.
There needs to be quite a bit of education on that.
Thank you for that.
We've talked a lot about the Internet, as you know. I'm wondering if you can talk a bit about the importance of our Internet infrastructure in the country. In my own riding, we know that more than half of the riding doesn't have high-speed Internet, by any measure. It's a philosophical question, but I'll throw it out to you, anyway.
4 p.m.
Deputy Minister, Department of Industry
The Internet is very important, and of course, we're moving to new generations of telecommunications like 5G, generally. How does Canada take full advantage of moving towards those new directions? First of all, in terms of digital infrastructure, we want to put a greater emphasis on broadband. As we mentioned earlier in response to a question from another member, we just met with the provinces to talk about how to develop this long-term strategy to put in place a robust digital infrastructure that meets the targets that have been described by the CRTC chair. They announced the basic service commitment as part of the CRTC.
4 p.m.
Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.
That's fair enough.
Thank you, Mr. Knubley.
I'm going to pass it back to Mr. Longfield, who had a couple of questions.
4 p.m.
Liberal
Lloyd Longfield Liberal Guelph, ON
Thank you.
I see that the strategic innovation fund under the innovation and skills plan has $15,042,000 attached to it.
We've been working with Lutherwood in Guelph, and with Conestoga College, with people who are trying to upgrade skills. How does this flow through the province, or is this something that directly gets into programming?
The Province of Ontario's new Conservative government is cutting back a lot of programs. Could they influence these types of investments, or is this something we need to look at going forward? How does that money get to the people who need to do the training?
4 p.m.
Deputy Minister, Department of Industry
I'll let Mitch reply to you in more detail, but SIF is a federal program, so these are federal projects.
The issue of addressing some of the shortcomings or changes in Ontario programming is something that we could look at as we move forward; however, to date our focus has been on identifying, particularly, R and D types of projects that are fed with the strategic innovation fund terms and conditions.
The $15 million that's referenced here is really just a reprofiling of projects. Two or three of the projects are going more slowly than we might have anticipated.
4 p.m.
Liberal
Lloyd Longfield Liberal Guelph, ON
Terrific.
Mitch, innovation.canada.ca is a great initiative, pulling everything together into one website. We need that for SMEs.
In 10 seconds, is there further work that's going to be done for supporting innovation with SMEs?