International Trade Committee on Nov. 26th, 2013

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Dr. Crago and Dr. Dodds, for bringing your perspective here.

I'll just make a quick comment. My friend Mr. Davies often decries the lack of specificity and detail, but now he is challenging your institutions to take the detail we have provided and come up with an economic assessment. Certainly there is a great deal of detail, and securing alignment of our 10 provinces and the territories towards the deal I think is a feat in itself.

First, I'd like to comment.

I had the good fortune, Dr. Crago, of speaking with the German ambassador to Canada last week, and he was still talking so positively about the Chancellor's visit to Dalhousie and the agreement struck with the Helmholtz Institute, which goes so much further than just bilateral relationships between countries to solidify those personal-professional relationships. It's a real tribute to the institution, and as a Dalhousie grad, I'm proud.

Dr. Dodds, I saw your op-ed last week in the The Chronicle Herald about St. Mary's University having 30% of its student population as foreign students. St. Mary's has really been the Canadian trailblazer in developing and selling our expertise abroad and in bringing students here. It's now an important contributor to our GDP.

I'm going to put two questions out that I invite both of you to comment on. The first is the skills gap. We had some testimony earlier today from folks involved in the aerospace industry in particular, talking about engineers for the IMP Group, or skilled trades people for the coming ship project. There is apparently $115 billion in megaprojects for Atlantic Canada, but they saw a skills deficit and the need to bring in workers. We're wondering how your institutions can help us solve that gap.

The second would be to comment on the growing importance of bringing foreign students here for their education. Our government has been trying to work on the international credentialling with CIC and Mitacs, and there are a number of things we're doing to expand in these areas.

I throw those out for a comment from you both.

[Dr. Martha Crago]

I could start with the skills gap, and I'll just talk very particularly to the shipbuilding initiative. Dalhousie worked very hard with the Irving company to put forward what was called the value proposition for that contract, in which the company had to describe what having that amount of business, $25 million, and now arguably slightly more, would mean and how they could use that to the wider value in the community.

We helped to design that value proposition, which they said got them high marks relative to other people competing for the same bid. In it is something called the marine partnership program and the design of that. That money coming from that portion of the value proposition that is already lined up with the existing money flowing to Irving is supposed to come into the Halifax Marine Research Institute as early as this December, to help to assemble a picture of what the training needs are, who is providing them, where in the country, and what else needs to be provided.

It's this assemblage of information, and we've been in constant communication with Irving, and all of our deans have been down en masse to have meetings, to ask what is it you need and what is it we can provide for you? Is it engineers? Is it a different kind of labour?

So this partnership program does not involve the university level only; it will also involve the college and high school level. But there is money coming forward from that shipbuilding contract to help diagnose the situation and figure out what programs we need to be coming up with. Certainly universities develop new programs. In fact, our biggest problem is retiring old ones that are not so useful any more.

I think the hope is that by working on that marine partnership program with a variety of universities across the country, we will be able to provide the skills that are needed for that initiative in any case.

Did you want to comment, Colin?

[Dr. J. Colin Dodds]

If I could follow up with respect to that, I chaired the board of the Greater Halifax Partnership at that time, and our staff did a lot of work with respect to the spillover benefits that would extend not only to Nova Scotia but actually to other parts of Canada.

The chamber of commerce, of course, has a program called “Ships Rise Here”; the previous slogan was “Ships Start Here”, which is really focusing on what benefits the small and medium-sized enterprises in the region might get from this particular contract and then sorting out what those particular needs might be for skilled personnel. Of course, it's not only in the area of engineering and so on; it's a whole vast area, and we want to be part of that, and will be part of that.

Coming back to the other question you raised with respect to international students, the figure.... The chair was talking about trade. For international student recruitment and everything associated with it—parents coming and spending time dropping their kids off, coming for convocations and tourism and so on—DFAIT's estimate is over $8 billion a year. Certainly, this region is very, very significant, given our success in attracting international students.

I commend Minister Flaherty and Minister Fast for establishing that panel. The vision was to double international student enrollment. We're not going up to 60%, I can assure you, but right across the country.... The key part was for quality not to be lost. I do come back to that global competitive index, that we want do better even than being sixth in the world, but we also want our own Canadian students to benefit from study abroad, internships, co-op programs. I really see tremendous benefits in this region for our students, not only the faculty, to link into the various exporting firms and multinationals that we have, some of whom are based in Europe.

[Dr. Martha Crago]

I would say one more thing in relation to international students.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Sure, go ahead.

[Dr. Martha Crago]

There's a wonderful example. One of the first 18 Canada excellence research chairs went to a man named Doug Wallace, who came to Dalhousie as an excellence chair in ocean science and technology. This is a person who first came to Canada when he was 22, to do a Ph.D. at Dalhousie. His wife came to Nova Scotia from Quebec to do her Ph.D. She is back here as a Canada research chair, tier one. He is back as an excellence research chair.

So these students that you train today return to you later, and they develop very, very strong ties with this region. I think we profit from that enormously, and I think that's the kind of link that international education is going to make. For programs like the one that's strongly partnered between the Helmholtz Association and Dalhousie, that's generations of scientists who will probably work in each other's midst and trade back and forth between the countries, and they are employed for a long time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Pacetti, the floor is yours.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the witnesses for coming today.

I think everybody is in favour of exchange and international students and students coming forward, but I'm not sure how the free trade will have the effect of increasing students coming here and our students going over there. I haven't heard that.

Dr. Crago, you say research ties will strengthen. My question is, how? We're already doing it. Are you asking for the government to put more money into the Canada Foundation for Innovation? These things are not happening. They happen ad hoc and then they all of a sudden disappear. The comment that we're hearing is that we can't rely on those. We need that funding to be stabilized.

How are you going to be able to increase research and all those items? This is aside from the research. This is more like a finance committee pre-budget consultation type of request.

[Dr. Martha Crago]

Do you want me to explain with an example? I think I—

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

I only have five minutes. They cut my time, so you have to try to do it as quickly as possible.

[Dr. Martha Crago]

Okay, here you go.

We have something called the Canada Foundation for Innovation. This funds large-scale infrastructure equipment, and in ocean science that is very costly, very big equipment. Europeans want to work over here because we have some particular ocean conditions and we have arctic oceans. They want to work here, so the Canada Foundation puts up 40% of the money for this equipment and normally a province puts up 40%. In this case, you could have Europeans put up 40% and Canada put up 40%, and we could share that agreement together.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

But we haven't seen that in the agreement, and that's the request.

[Dr. Martha Crago]

No, you haven't seen that in the agreement.

But let me tell you that the Galway agreement, I believe, comes in the wake of this agreement. We've never had that agreement in all the years we've shared the Atlantic, and now we do.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

You should be requesting that, then. That's what we're looking for—

[Dr. Martha Crago]

That's what I just did. I did request it.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

Okay. So we're asking for more money—

[Dr. Martha Crago]

Line it up with this agreement and you'll see very strong things happening as a result.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

Right. Nothing is going to happen if extra money isn’t invested—that's my belief—all the way from businesses to universities, education, non-profit, and whatever else.

[Dr. Martha Crago]

First, you need to line up what money there is. Horizon 2020 in Europe is extremely lined up—every project in the blue ocean section—with this agreement and with getting Canada on board. Every section in the blue ocean thing will give priority to projects that have Canadian researchers in them. That's European money coming to our researchers.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

And we have enough to match that?

[Dr. Martha Crago]

We could. We have programs. If they're properly lined up....

The CFI had a meeting in Rome this year to discuss how to line up its funding with the European funding so that we could partner. This equipment is too expensive for all of us to have it. To have a German boat and a Canadian boat.... We need to line that up together.

A lot of this is coming in the wake and in the interest of this agreement.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

Thank you.

I have a similar question.

Mr. Dodds, you spoke a lot about increasing the number of exchange students, international students. How is this agreement going to increase the bringing in of those international or exchange students?

[Dr. J. Colin Dodds]

As these other linkages develop, particularly research linkages and networks—

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

They already exist, do they not?

[Dr. J. Colin Dodds]

They already exist, but as they expand, automatically—