I'd like to introduce Carla Miner. I don't think she was on the witness list, so I apologize for that. I've been with SDTC for only two years, and so for the longevity and the really tough questions, I'll have to defer to her, because she has a breadth and depth of knowledge that I do not.
I hope many of you are familiar with SDTC. We are an arm's-length federal foundation that invests, with your permission, on behalf of Canadian taxpayers. Over the 15-year history of our organization—which I have had the privilege, as I said, of joining quite recently—we've invested in some 300 companies across Canada, or about a third of the clean tech market in general, with about a billion dollars on behalf of Canadians. All of that money is leveraged significantly through other private and sometimes provincial investment. It's my privilege to tell you a little bit about that today.
One thing I would say is that in addition to MEG, those other 299-plus companies are a significant strategic resource for Canada. They really have developed a core set of clean technologies that are, in some cases, already being exported in large numbers. They are poised and ready to expand that. That's an important thing for the committee and for your members to consider, because that strategic resource needs to be leveraged as we go forward. I would say that the opportunity is short, and I think you know that well. The opportunity is short because clean technologies are a strategic directive imperative for many nations across the world right now, and I'll get to that a little bit more in my remarks today.
Before I get started, I want to talk about two things, kind of definitional things. The first is the word “invention” and the second is the word “innovation”.
Invention is the realm of research and development and pre-commercial technology demonstration. The second part is the mandate you've given to us, and both parts are things that are very actively done by Natural Resources Canada and other departments, including Innovation, Science and Economic Development, as well as many of our sister provincial agencies.
Innovation, on the other hand, is really the commercialization of invention. It's the rubber hitting the road. It's actually getting sales, revenues, and, we would hope, profits. When you're in a business such as the one SDTC is in, trying to encourage environmental and economic prosperity, you really don't get there unless you get the innovation. Unless those technologies are deployed and real emission reductions and economic benefits start to accrue, we haven't been as successful as we need to be. I would start with that as a message for you today: if we only get to invention and we don't get to innovation, we really haven't gone far enough.
I'll move to the global context that we're talking about.
As I mentioned, time is short. Countries such as China, the United States, South Korea, and Germany are actively supporting their domestic innovators to get into that innovation space, to commercialize technologies they think will lead in the next 10, 15, 20, or 50 years as we tackle large challenges such as climate change, water security, food security, and the like. They have been in this space for a number of years and they're moving very quickly.
In 2015, clean energy—the topic for this committee—attracted $329 billion in global investment. This compares to about $810 billion for the oil and gas industry in the same year, so it's a significant component of the global economy even today. Given the intense global competition in clean tech, SDTC, along with other partners and a venture capital company in Montreal named Cycle Capital, asked ourselves what Canadian companies can do, where we might be leading, and how we might take advantage of this expanding market globally. I'll draw your attention to slide three in the package we gave to you, because it starts to give you some of the results of the research we've been doing in this area.
When we look at Canadian companies, we see they're very good in a number of areas. We asked ourselves how that looks, where they could expand, and where they sit globally. The first question, then, is in an ideas economy—
Oh, was it not distributed?