Industry Committee on April 5th, 2022

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Gagnon‑Gordillo, thank you for being with us today.

In November, Luc Sirois, Quebec's chief innovation officer, gave an interview to Québec Science magazine, during which he said that our companies are struggling to make investments in research and development.

Similar comments were made to this committee, including by Alain Lamarre in the study on the capacity to produce COVID‑19 vaccines, and by Alexandre Blais in this study.

Do you think the federal government can play a role in attracting more private investment in research and development, particularly in Quebec?

What do you think needs to be done?

[Olivier Gagnon-Gordillo]

That's a very broad question. I'll do my best to answer, but I'm not making any promises.

In terms of investments, we can look to the Business Development Bank of Canada, or BDC, a Crown corporation. Through its deep tech venture fund, BDC provides $200 million in funding. The quantum sector can grab a lot of that funding.

The situation in Canada has long been recognized. A small amount of pre-seed and seed money is available to early-stage businesses. This helps to launch projects, going from academic research to business start-up. Things start off well, but as soon as a business wants to move from the start-up to scale-up phase, the funding dries up. That is usually when foreign investors, mainly from the U.S., step in with venture capital and the company moves out of Canada.

Considerable support is needed on that front, especially beyond the series A round, when significantly larger venture capital investments are needed, in other words, series B and C. Those investments are necessary, and the federal government can certainly play a role.

Another consideration is how long the process takes for quantum technologies. Previously, obtaining venture capital would often take seven to 10 years, especially for cloud-based companies such as Facebook and Airbnb. In the case of quantum technologies, it's closer to 15 years. Developing a company in the quantum sector takes a lot longer and requires more patience when it comes to investment types. That is a factor. A bit more support from the federal government would make a big difference.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

I have another question for you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Sorry, Mr. Lemire, but your time is up.

We now go to Mr. Masse for two and a half minutes.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Very quickly to Mr. Brassard, are there a couple of countries out there that we should be aligning or working with? I'm interested to know who we should be focusing on. Is it the United States? Is it Australia? Is it Europe?

What do we do, as a country, in prioritizing who to work with?

[Dr. Gilles Brassard]

That's a difficult question. The United States is our ally, of course, and they do good things—good research, good development. I don't think we can pretend they're not there. Yes, we should collaborate with them, not that we had a choice.

Europe, as a whole, has a concerted effort to develop both quantum cryptography and a quantum Internet. It's a very concerted effort. It's going really well over there, and we would only benefit from collaborating with them.

Japan is also doing really good work, so it's take your pick. There's no single answer.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Ms. Hall, you mentioned something like a pan-Canadian degree on quantum computing. If we were able to concisely get some co-operation among Canadian universities, do you think it would be palatable enough, instead of having each university fight for a slice or a specialty?

Is that what you're proposing? Is it more of a comprehensive thing that would bring everybody together to have a more robust, centralized or specifically scoped approach?

[Dr. Kimberley Hall]

I absolutely think everybody should come together and coordinate. That would benefit everybody, because we would stop competing for graduate students and start collaborating to include them. It would also serve to help in terms of diversity and inclusion, because you could then reach students all across the country who would be able to access this training program.

Having it be accredited is important to bring people in from outside. That is something that easily hooks students, if they know that they're going to get something at the end. There are probably barriers to this, because I don't know how easy it will be to have courses offered at UBC and courses offered at Dalhousie that can be taken by other people, but in this electronic age in which we're all very used to taking courses online, it should be possible.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

I did that with the disability community, instead of fighting, and it's a really interesting concept.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much.

Go ahead, Madam Gray.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have a couple of questions.

Dr. Chong, do you know if hospitals and medical organizations are updating their privacy policies to prepare for quantum computing? If you're not aware of that, do you have any recommendations?

[Dr. Jaron Chong]

That's a very interesting question as well.

I have not heard of those kinds of updates. Everyone's thinking about this whole notion of a Q-day that will occur at one point, when all of our public key encryption systems will be disabled or compromised in some manner, but we haven't seen that timeline, or even a potential exploit yet. This is a very far-reaching cutting edge, but I don't see that there is a policy there.

I think that the evolution of health care information or information IT would parallel the financial systems quite closely. When you see the beginnings, just in the same way that public key encryption and SSL were incorporated for online banking.... I remember a time when you did not do online banking. You didn't have a smart phone. You would call a fax number. We transitioned to a point where that was safe to perform on a computer.

I can easily imagine that those same regulations that moved for finance will also very easily apply to health care. If there is a build-up of a quantum encrypted network or any similar standards or adoptions of certain algorithms or quantum resistance, those would all move in the same way.

I'd like to see from a government or regulator perspective right now.... Once we have some indication that potential exploits are going to occur—and that certain high-risk or critical industries and fields will be, first of all, categorized as high-risk—then the regulations are synchronized between them. I think other communication industries and the IT industry are really going to benefit from that, as well, and we can all learn from the various industries together.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you very much.

My next question is for—

[Dr. Gilles Brassard]

I'm sorry to interrupt, but please allow me to answer your question as well.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Okay, please give a really quick answer, because I have a couple of other questions.

[Dr. Gilles Brassard]

I'll do that. I'm sorry.

It's just that Toshiba has been very seriously working on protecting medical data with quantum cryptography. I'll stop there.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Great. Thank you for that.

Mr. Gagnon-Gordillo, you mentioned during your intervention how Canada is having a hard time retaining students. Leger has just released a study where immigrants were asked why they would not recommend Canada to future immigrants. One of the primary key reasons was due to the cost of living here.

I just wanted to ask you what your thoughts were when you said Canada is having a hard time retaining students. The cost of living, finding housing, the cost of housing, is that playing into some of this?

[Olivier Gagnon-Gordillo]

I think we need to separate out it in terms of which students. If the study you're talking about is all students, then, depending on the program they study, obviously it's not the same salaries. If we're talking about in this sector normally, there would be some great salaries where the cost of living would not be an issue. In terms of retaining the talent that studies here in quantum sciences and quantum technologies, normally it would lead to careers that lead to great salaries and the cost of living, in my opinion, in Canada would not be an issue.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Great. Thank you for that.

I have a question that anyone can respond to, so if you're interested and you have a thought on this, maybe physically raise your hand and then I can call on you.

We know the government right now is working on a quantum strategy. Are there any lessons or policies from other countries around quantum computing that is something Canada should pay attention to and replicate here in Canada? Does anyone have any thoughts on that—maybe just raise your hand—something that we would want to see in our strategy here?

Ms. Hall.

[Dr. Kimberley Hall]

I can say something. I think there's been some discussion about the DARPA program, and whether we should bring some kind of DARPA program to Canada. I participated in the DARPA SPiNS program years ago, so I'm somewhat familiar with the structure. I've also been a regular reviewer for DOE. I actually think that DOE challenge programs are a little bit more suitable than DARPA, in the sense that DARPA tends to have a lot of control by very few people over the process, and maybe the calls are a little bit too narrow. I very much like the challenge programs that NRC has introduced. I think these are excellent programs.

A lesson we can take from the U.S., which is different from what we're doing now, is the idea of a call for a certain topic. I think we can do that in a way that works. I think the NRC challenge programs are a good example of that working.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you, Dr. Hall. I'm out of time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Go ahead, Mr. Erskine-Smith.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thanks, Chair.

Picking up where you left off, Professor Hall, the NRC, through the challenge program, has a unique way of spending public dollars to deliver on a particular outcome and encourage competition. The proposed national strategy has a budget allocation of $360 million. Now some of that money has flowed.

This is for everyone, but let's start with you, Ms. Hall. Continuing challenge-like programs the way the NRC has begun is one way to spend those dollars. Would you have any other advice to the government in terms of how to best allocate the $360 million?

[Dr. Kimberley Hall]

I've sort of made this point during my speech, but the funding structure in Canada has evolved towards very large team grants, team grants like CREATE and like the CFI innovation fund. These programs are great and they have their purpose, but it's very important to note that these large team structures leave out a lot of people in Canada who are excellent scientists and just don't happen to be at the right university, for example, with a large number of people in a particular area or the critical mass. People are sometimes not included on teams because of, unfortunately, diversity and bias, which can sometimes enter into it. It's very important, if you want to fund the broad base of scientific strength in this country, that you also have open calls that are open to individuals and small teams, because these things will allow people to keep going.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you, Ms. Hall.

Professor Ghose, do you have anything to contribute in terms of how we ought to spend the $360 million over and above what Professor Hall has contributed?