Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning, honourable members. Thank you for giving me a chance to come and speak with you today.
My name is Robert Pelton, and I am a professor of chemical engineering at McMaster University. I've brought along with me Dr. George Rosenberg, who works with me on something called the Sentinel Bioactive Paper Network. I'll tell you a teeny bit about that.
For most of my career I've worked in research in the pulp and paper industry, so I'm here representing the academic research sector in pulp and paper. I want to tell you the state of that community, and I think you might be surprised. It's pretty much a good-news story. However, before I get into that I'd just like to make a couple of comments, as a Canadian, as an individual.
My first comment is that my heart really goes out to the small communities that are struggling across the country with mill closures. This is very, very tough, and there are no simple answers to this.
Secondly, on a more optimistic point, I'm told one in ten trees growing in the world are growing in Canada. Goodness, this has to be worth something, so the long term has to be an optimistic vision.
What about the Canadian academic community who are researching pulp and paper? Who are we? Well, there are about 100 university professors across Canadian universities who spend at least part of their time doing research on pulp and paper. There are major pulp and paper research centres situated at universities, spanning from the University of British Columbia all the way to the University of New Brunswick. So it's a big effort.
What do we do? Well, we do what many academics do. We produce well-trained people, and I think this is really important. We produce scientists and engineers who are going to be vital for the revitalization of the forest products sector.
The other thing we do is research crazy things, and this eventually leads to new technologies, new inventions. And this too is a key. I think the community has a lot to offer to the revitalization of the forest products sector.
How are we doing? How successful are we at that? Here I want to make a very clear distinction. I want to separate the research, and particularly the academic research sector, from the pulp and paper producers. We all know and have heard in great detail of the troubled times the pulp and paper producers are going through. The situation is quite a bit more optimistic in the research sector.
Canada, in my opinion, is a world player in academic research in pulp and paper. Our major competitors are Sweden and Finland, and in some areas we are leading the world. I'd like to give you one example, and it's a good example, because we can ask, then, why it is successful and whether we can do more of this.
In September 2005, 28 university professors and 50 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows started working together towards a common goal. They're doing this under the auspices of something called the Sentinel Bioactive Paper Network. This is an NSERC, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, network. What this group is doing is trying to produce something we call “bioactive paper”. The simple explanation is to perhaps give you a couple of examples.
Perhaps you could envisage buying packaged meat with bits of paper in it, and the paper signals you and says, “Don't eat this meat. There is something dangerous in there.” Or perhaps you could envisage a disaster scenario in a developing world situation where you have a water filter and you can filter water through the paper. The paper kills the pathogens and tells the user that the water is safe to drink.
This is what we're trying to do. We're essentially trying to create a litmus paper that, instead of detecting acid and base, detects pathogens.
We've only been doing this for two and a half years now. We've had a lot of attention. In the December issue of The New York Times Sunday magazine they had a “Year in Ideas” piece where they listed Sentinel as one of the top 70 new ideas in the world in 2007. That's a big statement.
Our major competitors, the Finns and the Swedes, are starting to copy us and put together the same kind of organization. We have a lot of good results coming up—patents and that sort of thing. So I think we're successful.
Why are we successful, and how is this going to help the forest products sector? In my opinion, we are successful because Canada is a world leader at doing research networks. A research network is when you get a group of professors in a whole bunch of different areas all working together to tackle a similar problem.
Our American friends to the south don't do this very well. They believe in competition, and individual research groups fight each other to be the best. Our European competition has these huge EU-funded things that are very bureaucratic. But Canada is special.
These networks are funded by you guys. These are federal government networks. We have the networks of centres of excellence program, the NCEs, we've had the new business-led NCEs, and we have the NSERC research networks. These are really special, and they're giving results.
There are areas where we're lagging behind our competition on the science and technology front. I'll give you a couple of quick examples and then finish up.
One example is in the area of printed electronics. The vision is that you print simple circuits on paper or packaging to do smart things. We are way behind the Swedes and the Finns in this area.
Another area, one that has perhaps a lot more impact for us and has been mentioned already this morning, is this concept of biorefining. Biorefining has become a bit of a buzzword, but what it really means is turning the biomass—and in our case, this morning, the forest products—into fuels and chemicals. There are things going on in biorefining in Canada, but we're behind the Americans and we're particularly behind the Scandinavians already.
I want to finish up. I have two messages and two recommendations.
My first message is that the academic sector is important for the revitalization of our resources. Two, we're doing pretty good. We're a world player.
A lot of our funding is coming from the federal government, so what can you do? You can continue to support the existing programs, the networks of centres of excellence, the business-led NCEs, and the NSERC programs. These are all vital for us. If you want to do more, and it would be nice, I would recommend considering sector-specific research funding. Target some money at the biorefineries or the Sentinel renewal or some of the other really great projects that are coming down the pipeline.
It seems to me that things like this have been done, where the federal and provincial governments have worked together to support the auto industry. I think this is a good model.
Thank you.