Science and Research Committee on Oct. 29th, 2024

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Would you say my “madly off in all directions” is a reasonable description of what is currently happening?

[Frédéric Bouchard]

No, it's a historical artifact. All departments need research because it's really important. Initially, they didn't have a mission-driven instrument, so they would do funding calls from within their department.

If you have capstone, you can have the department of agriculture say, “Okay, I want to look into soybean production,” and, instead of running a funding call through agriculture, they can transfer the envelope to capstone, which will have the full-time equivalent to do the calls, disburse the money, have the excellence, the peer review and so on. It can basically act—I don't want to say “broker”—as the point of service for these funding calls. You would have the expertise. Is that not right? Whereas not all...different departments don't have the capacity to run these funding calls at scale.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Mr. Charbonneau, you were nodding along there. Do you want to add a comment quickly?

[Dr. Sylvain Charbonneau]

No. I think that Monsieur Bouchard expressed himself very well.

I'd like to come back to a challenge that has troubled me for some time. You talked about business expenditure on R and D in this country—

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Yes.

[Dr. Sylvain Charbonneau]

—which really has been in free fall for over two decades. It's something that we need to address in Canada.

If I can just revert back to what the mandate of the Canada Foundation for Innovation is—which I did not expand on during my brief—we are supporting core facilities of all sorts across the country in colleges, CEGEPs, in universities.

I spun off a company myself about 20 years ago, an IT company, and if had it not been for these core facilities and these very sophisticated pieces of equipment that I could have accessed, there is no way I would have been able to raise tens of millions of dollars in venture capital. This is extremely important for the country, plugging into what Mr. Bouchard was saying.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you very much. Now we'll turn to MP Chen for five minutes.

[Shaun Chen, Liberal, Scarborough North, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Thank you to our witnesses.

Mr. Bouchard, thank you for being here and for your great work.

I want to continue with some of the conversation that's happened today, and you described your "loving appreciation” for the “crazy amounts of money” that the United States spends on research.

At the same time, I think you might hear from others, perhaps on the innovation committee, talking about the same crazy amounts of money that Canadian government invests in supporting research and development and innovation in driving it.

I'd like to understand that gap. I think it's important to start off by underscoring that Canada has an incredible education system. It is the envy of the world. We have incredibly talented people and a well-developed system of education that consistently ranks high. Yet at the same time we do see the talent gap widen between Canada and our OECD partners.

How do we bridge that gap in supporting the innovation that is needed? As you mentioned in a previous comment, the Canadian economy is focused a lot on SMEs. How do we bridge that gap between this great investment in research that we are doing, that perhaps, yes, we should continue to do more on, and ensuring that these talented researchers and workers of the future economies are going to stay in Canada, are going to help develop the next generation of technologies and innovation that are going to support our economy?

[Frédéric Bouchard]

I'm going to give you a concrete example. I'm dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Université de Montréal. Part of my job is raising money, philanthropy with donors, and so I'm trying to do this because the research money is not sufficient for the government. There are other people willing to help, but even then, that's not up to the scale that is required to maintain the talent here.

I had managed to get a $6 million endowed chair for one of my chemistry professors, a young star, awesome. I got the money and I was telling him, I've got it, you're going to benefit from this, this is an endowed chair, you're getting money—well, I didn't tell him forever—but an endowed chair basically means that you have the capital and you're just using the interest to fund the research.

He got an offer from Germany. He left for Germany, and he took three of his Ph.D. students. He was nice about it. He said, "Thanks, Dean Bouchard, for trying this, but Germany is paying me for a brand new lab". He left with his graduate students who are not German. These are Canadian students and they could have a nice lab in Germany. He works on batteries, and I can guarantee you that in five years he'll have some patents in Germany and we'll be licensing them here.

The government is doing a lot and I am extremely grateful. I think the additional investments that have been announced in the last budget will go a very long way in making us competitive, but before these investments, we were in the league, if you will, but we weren't competitive, and so we were losing out concretely talent that we desperately need to keep in Canada.

[Shaun Chen, Liberal, Scarborough North, ON]

The creation of capstone is to modernize the system and to create the coordination and the agility that is needed.

How do you believe this can help play a role, beyond investing more funding to innovation, to research and to science?

How can the organization play a role in also bridging the gap?

[Frédéric Bouchard]

Right now, if you want to coordinate with, let's say, CFI, with Mitacs or with Genome.... Let's say, depending on the project, you have other external actors that you want to connect to. There's already good coordination between each council and CFI, but then you would have capstone talking to CFI to see if they can work together to simplify things. You could have a link to Mitacs. It just simplifies leveraging other actors in the ecosystem.

It simplifies discussions with the provinces. This we can get to with CFI. A lot of the money is actually provided by the provinces as matching funds for infrastructure, but all of these discussions are happening in a diffuse way. Now some of it would be in capstone. That would help identify goals, identify priorities, move on to these strategies, and then leverage the other partners so that they can add additional funds beyond government money.

[Shaun Chen, Liberal, Scarborough North, ON]

To go back to your example about—

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

You're out of time.

We've allowed each one to go over because it's just such wonderful testimony.

Now we will turn to MP Blanchette-Joncas for two and a half minutes, please.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Bouchard, as a former president of ACFAS, the Association francophone pour le savoir, you are aware of the importance of the advancement and dissemination of knowledge in French.

In your report, you stress the importance of equitable treatment of funding applications submitted in French within the federal system.

Could you explain how you envisage the implementation of the recommendations you have made, in particular the ones intended to ensure that research conducted in French has the same opportunities and the same resources as research conducted in English?

What specific mechanisms would be needed to ensure fairness in this regard, and how could a capstone organization play a key role in promoting the production and dissemination of knowledge in French, both in Canada and at the international level?

[Frédéric Bouchard]

Thank you for your question.

I don't know whether I can talk about a specific mechanism, but I will offer you some avenues for thought.

The proportion of research that is done in French—and I am not talking about francophone researchers, I am talking about research done in French—varies widely among the various scientific communities. In literature, humanities and social sciences, there are more researchers doing their research in French than, for example, at NSERC. Again, I am not talking about francophone or anglophone researchers, I am talking about research being done in French.

Having a capstone organization would allow for better exchange of ways of doing things and of tools and practices, and this would help to generate more of certain types of research. For example, without presuming to know what would happen, I think it might encourage NSERC or the CIHR, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, to conduct more research in French.

With respect to the dissemination of scholarly publications in the humanities and social sciences in French, I am letting my personal interests show when I tell you I am the chair of the board of directors of Érudit, which is supported by the CFI and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

How can we deploy these tools, which are born out of a need that comes mainly from the francophone humanities and social sciences community? How can tools like these be disseminated in other scientific communities? Generally speaking, the capstone organization could make it possible to disseminate good ideas or good tools outside the context in which they initially emerge. Will it? That is a different matter.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you.

MP Cannings, go ahead for two and a half minutes, please.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

I wish we had another day to do this because I'd like to get to Dr. Charbonneau as well.

Dr. Bouchard, you mentioned that you had some ideas about budgeting and I don't believe you had a real chance to answer that question. I'll give you my time for you to comment on that because I think it's a very important aspect.

[Frédéric Bouchard]

This is where each word I say.... Well, you know, a lot of people are listening right now.

Let me be honest. We have most of the programming capacity, if you will. We have the staff to run most of these competitions, existing and otherwise. I think it's about redeploying existing human resources to support the agency, rather than growing them. There will be a need for a certain number of employees, but the councils are efficient organizations in terms of human resources. Even with that efficiency, certain of those human resources could be redeployed towards the capstone. Currently, there is some tri-council programming run from TIPS, some run from NSERC and some run from CIHR. My hunch is that there are ways of redeploying existing human resources. They could be allocated to mission-driven calls or interdisciplinary calls.

In terms of programming budgets, that's where it's floating. Again, this is very important: If you're redeploying existing resources but don't increase research budgets.... I'm putting aside the operational budget. I think a lot of the operational budget could be redeployed in the system to achieve many of the goals, but not all of them. There will be some need for new employees, but it's not a huge over-and-above addition, if it's done correctly.

However, the research programming budget needs to be increased because, if we reallocate CIHR, NSERC and SSHRC funding to do the mission-driven part, we will lose even more ground relative to our competitors. The programming envelope, in certain respects, is more floating, because mission-driven calls could be part of a strategy that has a few years. The recurrence of some programming envelopes is not seen in the same way. If you say that you want to do five years of quantum cryptography or five years of food security, you budget for five years. There's no recurrence. You just say that, for five years, you're supporting this kind of research. Everybody's expectations should be adjusted to the fact that, in five years, there may not be additional money—or there may be. The government of the day will have to determine that.

It's a different kind of programming budget for the mission-driven part than it is for the council part. The council part is about more stable funding, so the recurrence is very important. The predictability of the funding for investigator-driven research is more important than it is for the mission-driven part.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you.

I think that's a good place to wrap it up, although I agree that we could sit and listen to this for a long time.

Thank you to both of you. If there's anything further you would like to add or didn't get a chance to speak about here, please feel free to make a written submission to the clerk, because it would be welcome. Again, we're very grateful you were here.

The next committee meeting will be on Thursday, October 31. I don't know whether you're coming in costume or not.

Is it the will of the committee to adjourn the meeting?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Okay, the meeting is adjourned.