Science and Research Committee on April 28th, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Good evening, everyone.

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to the tenth^x meeting of the Standing Committee on Science and Research.

I'll just go over a few rules.

The Board of Internal Economy requires that committees adhere to the following health protocols, which are in effect until June 23, 2022. All individuals wishing to enter the parliamentary precinct must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. All those attending the meeting in person must wear a mask, except for members who are at their place during proceedings. Please contact our excellent clerk of the committee for further information on preventative measures for health and safety.

As the chair I will enforce these measures and as always I thank you for your co-operation.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the House Order of November 25, 2021.

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I remind you that all comments should be addressed through the chair.

When you are not speaking, your microphone should be muted. The committee clerk and I will maintain a speaking list for all members.

I'd like to welcome our excellent witnesses tonight. This is exciting. It's the second study of this inaugural committee. The study concerns top talent, research and innovation.

For this first panel we first have Thomas Bell, professor, Imperial College London. From the Quebec Student Union, we have Jonathan Desroches, president; and from the University of Toronto, Munk School of Global Affairs, we have David Wolfe, professor and co-director, innovation policy lab. We welcome you. We will be having five-minute statements from each of you.

With that, we will start with Professor Bell, for five minutes. The floor is yours.

[Dr. Thomas Bell, Professor, Imperial College London, As an Individual]

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker, for this opportunity to speak with you today in my personal capacity as a Canadian and as an academic living abroad.

Although I've lived outside of Canada for some years, I have a strong connection to Canada. I visit frequently and have much experience with the Canadian grant funding system, having sat on the NSERC discovery grant committee for ecology and evolution for three years, a committee that I then co-chaired for one year. In these roles, I've read and evaluated the research programs for a large portion of ecology and evolution research in the country, so I'm well aware of the quality of Canadian science.

I wanted to tell you a little bit about myself. I grew up in Montreal and I went to McGill for my bachelor's in biology. My graduate degrees were both funded through scholarships from NSERC, first as a master's student at the University of British Columbia, and then overseas at the University of Oxford in England for my doctoral degree. I was quickly hired as a lecturer in Oxford for several years, and I was then awarded a Royal Society research fellowship, which funded my salary for eight years, allowing me to focus exclusively on my research. During that time, I moved to Imperial College and was made full professor two years ago. I've recently been awarded a large grant to develop and direct a new research centre, which will occupy me for at least the next 10 years.

I've described my background because I believe it's relevant to the committee's work, and I understand it's the reason why you've asked me here today. Having been lured out of Canada by the prospects of new opportunities, I've become embedded in the system over here. As for any career, and as I'm sure many on the committee can appreciate, it becomes more difficult to move over time. Partly this is because you learn how the system works, and partly because personal situations change; you start a family, you buy a house, and so forth, all of which anchor you in one location. I believe it's important for the committee to consider what motivates scientists to move or to stay.

How do you retain and attract the best scientists to Canada? I can speak from my personal experience.

First, top scientists are attracted by top science, and the rest, I believe, is window dressing. This is not a novel opinion and has been true since the start of the university system.

While there is an understandable desire for governments to focus on technological innovation rather than discovery science, the one is not possible without the other. The best scientists will not come to Canada and will not stay in Canada if they feel that their science will suffer. Inspiration and innovation almost always come from being in environments with other top scientists in complementary fields. This can create a positive feedback loop where strength builds on strength, and the best scientists come because the best scientists are already there.

To a large extent, the question of how to attract and retain top scientists should therefore be rooted in how science innovation can be fostered in Canada right now. I think if you build it, then they will come.

The second point I want to make is that attracting scientists and retaining scientists are two separate issues. There are significant academic costs in moving labs. It's hugely disruptive. Packing up and reassembling a lab takes time, often resulting in months of inactivity. Moving to a new university means relearning all of the internal systems and ways of doing things, and moving countries is doubly disruptive. Scientists moving to Canada for the first time need to learn how funding and hiring works and how to attract students, and they need to build their collaboration networks from scratch. Many will have young families and would need to learn how the school system works. The cost of moving is therefore very high for a scientist, so attracting the top scientists to Canada is more difficult than retaining scientists. If you want to attract the top scientists from outside the country, these significant additional costs should be considered.

My third point is that junior and senior scientists have different motivations. It often only takes a nudge in one direction early in the career to change an academic trajectory. Later career researchers—“proven talent”—are lower risk, but more costly to move and often have a shorter scientific career ahead of them. I believe the committee should carefully consider these divergent motivations when they make recommendations about how to retain scientists at different career stages.

Finally, I think its worth mentioning that you're competing for the top scientists in a global marketplace. To attract and retain the top scientists, you need to understand what financial and scientific rewards will draw them to Canada, or they'll go elsewhere. In Britain and Europe, the funding opportunities are much greater and more varied than in Canada, and the concentration of universities is also much greater and more varied. The system over here is far from perfect, but from that perspective Canada starts at a disadvantage.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you so much, Professor Bell, and congratulations on the recent professorship. We appreciate the hour you're speaking to us tonight.

Before we go to our second one, I will give you a warning with this yellow card at four and a half minutes, so that you know there are 30 seconds to go.

Thank you so much.

We will now go to President Desroches for five minutes, please.

[Jonathan Desroches, President, Quebec Student Union]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My name is Jonathan Desroches, and I am the president of the Quebec Student Union, the UEQ.

The UEQ represents 91,000 university students in Quebec and, at the federal level, works in partnership with the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, or CASA. Together UEQ and CASA represent more than 365,000 undergraduate and graduate students across the country.

I would first like to thank the committee for its invitation to appear and present students' views on research issues to the federal government.

The work you are doing is important and will ultimately shed light on the underfunding of the student scholarship programs of the three federal granting councils: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, or SSHRC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, NSERC, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, or CIHR. This underfunding has major consequences for the entire research ecosystem in Canada. Moreover, all the witnesses with whom you have addressed this matter in recent months have acknowledged that the student programs of the federal granting councils are not adequately funded.

The following figures will help explain the problem. In the past 10 years, NSERC's budget allocation for academic scholarships has declined from 13% to 8% of total funding. For SSHRC, that share was 17% 10 years ago and is now 13%. The figure for CIHR has fallen from 7% to 5% over the same period. However, it is virtually impossible to access CIHR's numbers and therefore difficult to form a comprehensive picture of the situation.

The UEQ estimates that a $120 million investment would be necessary to restore the percentage of funding granted to scholarship programs to its level of 10 years ago. That funding must be used to address one of the concerns raised in the 2017 Naylor report: longer scholarship terms. Master's scholarships are currently granted for one year and doctoral awards for three years, whereas a master's degree generally takes at least two years to complete and a doctorate four.

The result is thus that our students' incomes are cut off at their source in the final years of their postgraduate programs. This extends the time it takes to complete their studies as they are then forced to find alternative sources of income to support themselves as they complete their doctorates. It can even make it impossible to complete a degree.

The holder of the Canada Research Chair on the Transformations of Scholarly Communication at the Université de Montréal has shown that students who receive funding are more likely to earn a degree than those who do not. This is obviously not surprising.

For scholarships genuinely to enable students to focus on their master's or doctoral degrees, the values of those scholarships must be adequate. As one witness told this committee a few weeks ago, funding amounts for scholarships have not changed in two decades. I am referring, for example, to NSERC's $21,000 and SSHRC's $20,000 scholarships. Scholarship amounts must be high enough to enable students to focus on their studies and research. Indexing those scholarships would obviously be a good way to prevent them from losing their value in the long term.

If we are to increase the number of students who choose to undertake a doctorate, to conduct high-level research and to participate, now or later, in innovative work in all research sectors and fields in Canada, the number of scholarships offered by the student programs of the federal granting councils will have to increase. Underfunding prevents us from taking advantage of the talent pool we already have. Excellent candidates are many. They must be supported.

As in anything else, funding is obviously the central problem, but there is another factor that requires no investment and that can improve the situation. Unlike the situation in Quebec, there is no student representation on the boards of the federal granting councils. Students are represented on the boards of all the institutions of the Fonds de recherche du Québec, the provincial counterpart of the federal granting councils. Students have no voice on the federal granting councils, and we suspect that is one of the reasons why students' problems are overlooked.

To improve the situation, we encourage you to draw on the model established by Quebec's chief scientist, Rémi Quirion, and amend the enabling statutes of the three federal granting councils to add student representation to their boards.

In conclusion, I would note that master's and doctoral degrees are the gateway to careers in research and innovation. Graduate students are not merely the researchers of tomorrow; they are also today's researchers because they are already making considerable contributions to scientific publications and developing knowledge as they study. They must be provided with the resources to continue those efforts.

Thank you. I will be pleased to speak with you at greater length.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you, Dr. Desroches.

Now we will go to the University of Toronto, the Munk School of Global Affairs.

Professor David Wolfe, the floor is yours for five minutes.

[Professor David Wolfe, Professor of Political Science, and Co-Director, Innovation Policy Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto]

Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to emphasize that I'm speaking as a professor at the University of Toronto and a co-director of the innovation policy lab. I don't represent the Munk School, and I'm certainly not authorized to speak for the University of Toronto as a whole.

I've been studying innovation in Canada for the past 40 years. In 2018, I was a member of the expert panel that prepared the report “Competing in a Global Innovation Economy” for the Council of Canadian Academies.. I want to expand on the mandate I was given by the committee a little bit, to address the innovation aspect of your title.

As the recent federal budget acknowledged, Canada is currently experiencing a crisis of business innovation. There's a growing recognition that in order to succeed, we need to invest more in growth-oriented, small and medium-sized companies that have high export innovation potential. These firms are often labelled scale-up firms.

Research that we've undertaken at the innovation policy lab, using the most comprehensive review of StatsCan microdata, finds that these firms have a disproportionate effect on job creation and revenue generation. Compared to non-scale-ups, they have a much greater impact on revenue generation; they innovate more and they're more productive; and they often export more, which is critical for Canada.

The critical challenge for us is to identify the policy supports that scale-ups need to maintain their success and continue to export and grow. We've also conducted extensive interviews with technology scale-up firms in Canada to identify what they need. The research results are clear and unambiguous: Scale-ups need access to capital, access to talent and access to markets in order to grow. The kinds of government policies they're looking for are the ones that will provide them with these three critical ingredients to support their growth.

None is more challenging than the need for later-stage growth capital. There are simply not enough programs in Canada to help scale-ups expand once they reach a certain critical threshold, often around $50 million in revenue and sales. Once they reach that point, they're often left to their own devices to find growth financing, which typically comes from abroad. This often results in the sale of majority control to foreign investors, which increases the odds of an early exit before the Canadian scale-up has reached its full potential.

With respect to talent, which is also critical, scale-up firms are appreciative of the measures that have been taken in recent years by the federal government to accelerate the hiring of foreign technology workers with unique or specialized skills that can help them grow. However, this is only one part of a much more complex picture.

In our detailed studies of technology clusters across Canada over the past two decades, there's one consistent finding. It's the depth of the local labour market for critical skills that anchors many of our most successful technology clusters in place, and our universities, polytechnic and community colleges have been the critical providers of many of these technical skills.

Another key finding is that post-secondary institutions are relatively good at reading and anticipating local labour market conditions and expanding their program offerings to meet anticipated demand. However, there's often a lag, especially in times of rapid expansion like the present, when the demand for skills can outpace the ability of post-secondary institutions to respond.

The dilemma in the current period is exacerbated by the dramatic info we've seen on foreign multinationals setting up research operations in high-technology centres across the country, such as Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, to tap into the specialized skills in those labour markets. This creates competition in the local labour markets between domestic firms trying to scale, and the inward flow of investment from multinationals. It also generates pressure on local wages, which is advantageous for the individuals being hired, but exacerbates the challenges faced by domestic firms in scaling.

We may be in a situation where post-secondary institutions need greater public support in the short term to rapidly expand their intake of students in programs with high demand for their graduates. Here I'm thinking along the lines of the access to opportunities program, which was introduced by the Ontario government in the late 1990s to increase the number of computer science graduates in Ontario universities by 20,000 a year over three years—so 60,000 graduates funded by the provincial government over three years.

I recognize that this is primarily a provincial area of jurisdiction, but there are numerous precedents for the federal government to provide funding to support post-secondary education. The federal government is still currently doing that in principle through existing health and social transfers.

The final policy area is access to markets. One of the most commonly stated preferences by scale-up firms is for the Canadian government to assume a more active role in employing demand-side instruments, such as procurement, in a targeted fashion to act as a market maker in support of scale-up firms in strategic technology sectors. Procurement was frequently cited as a missed opportunity to enable Canadian firms to overcome pressures for early exit by using the government as a reference customer—

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Professor Wolfe, I am so sorry to interrupt. I'm sure my colleagues are going to follow up. I have to be fair to everyone.

[Prof. David Wolfe]

That's fine. I knew I had a little more to say than what was allowed. I'm happy to respond in questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

I am just going to say that we want to thank all of you. We're delighted you're here.

Now we're going to questioning by our members. This will be a six-minute round. We'll begin with Mr. Tochor.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses today.

Mr. Wolfe, you were talking about government procuring more services from the sector, if I heard you correctly. What would that look like? What services could the government be procuring from—

[Prof. David Wolfe]

I'm talking often about not just services, but also goods and products. We have common-purpose procurement programs. The federal government has introduced several programs over the past five or six years to purchase innovative products from small Canadian technology firms. These programs need to be deepened and expanded.

The critical notion is the idea of a reference customer. Firms often tell us that when they go into international markets to try to sell their goods overseas, one of the first questions they get is who's buying their product in Canada. They want to know that. It makes a big difference if they're selling to federal or provincial governments.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

To follow up on that one, what are the markets that we're, unfortunately, not in right now for these scale-up companies? What countries, I guess, would be...?

[Prof. David Wolfe]

I'm sorry; that would require a detailed study, which I haven't undertaken.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Okay.

[Prof. David Wolfe]

If you look at the overall export statistics, we sell primarily into the U.S., and to a secondary degree to the U.K., and a little bit to the EU, but if you also look at the overall composition of our exports, we export, overwhelmingly, minerals, oil and gas and manufactured goods, particularly automotive products. High technology exports are a minor fraction of these other three goods and commodities.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

I have a couple of more questions for you; then I'm going to switch over to Jonathan.

You talked about the three-year plan by the Ontario government to increase the number of graduates, I believe, by 20,000 and some. Can you report on—

[Prof. David Wolfe]

Yes, the plan was 20,000 a year for three years.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Were they successful in increasing that?

[Prof. David Wolfe]

I believe they were. This was colloquially referred to as the “Nortel program”. It resulted from a tremendous amount of pressure exerted on the government by Nortel in the late 1990s when they were expanding rapidly. I've heard some people express the view that it was a waste, because all of those people came on stream just as the tech collapse occurred in 2001 and 2002.

When you look at the long term, at the current shortages and the current demand that we're still facing and the rapid growth of the tech economy globally over the past 20 years, all of those graduates were absorbed into the economy and we're in a comparable position today.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Great. Thank you very much for your testimony.

I'm going to switching gears a little bit and go to Jonathan, president of the Quebec Student Union.

You talked about increased funding of, I believe, $120 million that would satisfy the ask. Education, for the most part, has been identified as being provincial. On that ask, it's a positive ask, but unfortunately, with the reality of how indebted our country is now, we might have to go the other way.

If you were going to save $10 million on post-secondary education in Quebec, where do you think that first cut would be?

[Jonathan Desroches]

Thank you for your question.

I'd like to point out that funding for post-secondary education is a provincial responsibility but that much of research funding is federal. I'm referring here to research grants that are the domain of the federal government and the federal granting councils.

I'm aware that tough decisions have to be made. That's why we're talking about research and innovation because, in the long run, they contribute to the country's capacity for innovation and thus to our economy. Ultimately, when we support our researchers properly, they're able to create private sector businesses and non-profit organizations.

We know that researchers used to stay in the academic sector, but that's no longer the case. Once they complete their doctorates, researchers can establish organizations or private companies, for example. That would be a major boost to the country's economy.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

If we were going to target funding for a little bit on the positive outcomes and spend that extra dollar on education/scholarships and whatnot, and support more capital and maybe a tax credit of some sort for the would-be businesses to encourage additional growth and/or hopefully to encourage students and research in general, we need to encourage general research, but as a country, if we're going to meet our potential, I think we need to double down on research that produces a product of some sort that we can market to the world.

I'm running out of time, so just quickly on that concept, is there, just in general.... You talk about Quebec—

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

You have 15 seconds.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

No, I have a longer one than that to ask.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Do you want to ask them to table it?