Science and Research Committee on May 19th, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you so very much, Dr. Annan.

We will now go to Dr. McCauley, president of the University of Calgary.

We welcome you tonight. The floor is yours.

[Dr. Edward McCauley, President and Vice-Chancellor, University of Calgary]

Thank you.

I'm pleased to have this opportunity to speak to this House of Commons committee this evening.

Ms. Duncan, it's great to see you again.

The University of Calgary is a place to start something—a new research project, a new business, a new movement to improve the world—but at the heart of anything new are the people who start it, our talent. That is why I'm so pleased to be with you today to talk about the role our federal government can play in fostering talent retention, research and innovation.

I believe there are three things our federal government could do to really make a difference. First, increase support to top students. Second, invest more in the federal research chairs program. Third, expand targeted federal investments for innovation supports for universities to catalyze private sector collaboration.

I want to explain why these investments are so important through an example. For many years, the University of Calgary has been growing its expertise in quantum science. Quantum science isn't just fascinating research; it has real-life application for Canadians and is expected to contribute $142 billion in revenues and 229,000 jobs by 2040. The jobs are across all sectors—health, finance, agriculture, energy, transportation and logistics.

In 2021 the University of Calgary successfully attracted a global computer giant, Mphasis, to establish its Canadian headquarters in Calgary. Mphasis decided to partner with the University of Calgary for three reasons—first, our excellence in quantum research; second, our ability to generate job-ready talent; and third, the potential to be part of a quantum ecosystem with post-secondaries and quantum company start-ups. As part of the deal, Mphasis will immediately create 1,000 jobs in Calgary and invest in 1,000 work-integrated learning opportunities for students.

In short, this is exactly what universities across Canada can and should be doing to attract and retain talent, both researchers and students. The challenge is that for every one Mphasis, there are many more that could happen if we made bigger and better investments in retaining research and student talent and if universities had the resources to create and pursue these kinds of partnerships in a systematic way.

How, then, do we make more success stories like Mphasis happen with universities across the country? First, the federal government can invest to improve the recruitment and retention of top graduate students and trainees. Companies like Mphasis are looking for access to top talent. They're looking for universities and colleges to provide it. Research universities create a great student experience, and 94% of University of Calgary undergraduate students get jobs within six months of graduation. We're great at creating talent, but as a country we need more of it. To do that, we need to expand the number of tri-agency training awards to ensure that top talent doesn't leave Canada and we need to increase the value of these awards to make them competitive.

We can also do better at attracting top international students and post-docs to come to Canada. Investments to increase the number and value of awards such as the Vanier graduate scholarships and the Banting post-doctoral fellowships would support both domestic talent retention and international talent recruitment, with significant long-term benefits for Canada's innovation and productivity.

Second, Canada needs to improve federal funding programs to attract research talent. Mphasis partnered with the University of Calgary because we had some of the world's top researchers, but we need to be able to keep developing and retaining those researchers. The Canada research chairs program is a key program for post-secondary institutions in attracting and retaining top talent. The prestige of a CRC is attractive, but the funding levels have not changed in many years, making them less effective as a talent attraction tool.

The Canada excellence research chairs also attract top talent. CRCs and CERCs have far-reaching impacts. They attract high-quality trainees, undergraduate and graduate students and post-docs to contribute to Canada's talent pool. Additional investments to grow the number of CRCs and CERCs and increase the value of CRCs would support talent attraction and retention. Imagine if we created new funding streams for early career researchers that would renew and refresh university faculty with world-leading researchers.

Finally, Canada needs a coordinated strategic approach to driving partnerships, innovation and commercialization between Canada's universities and the private sector to attract top talent involvement. Canada was able to build a great partnership with Mphasis. The University of Calgary is number one in Canada for start-up creation, and has created a rich innovation ecosystem that supports industry collaboration, new entrepreneurial ventures and bringing research to market, but we can't scale this kind of potential without support, and neither can other universities across the country. Unlike other jurisdictions around the world, Canada does not have a coordinated national approach to stimulating and supporting university partnerships with industry.

Additional targeted funding in federal investments for proven innovation supports for universities would help to expand the breadth and depth of partnership, thereby engaging more researchers, students and industries. In short, these investments would make success stories like Mphasis the norm.

The competitiveness of Canada's economy and our future prosperity depend on retaining top talent and translating research into commercial opportunities. Strategic investments in Canada's universities will attract and retain world-class researchers with wide-scale benefits for Canadian businesses and society. Talent is the magnet that Canada can use to attract global investment and companies. I think that's what we all want.

Thank you for your attention.

Thank you for the opportunity to present my ideas today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you so much, President McCauley.

Again, I want to thank all of you. We're really starting a conversation in Canada between the research community and parliamentarians, so we thank you for your expertise, your experience and your knowledge.

Now our committee, a very committed and dedicated committee, wants to ask you questions. Tonight we begin with six-minute rounds, and we begin with Ms. Gladu.

The floor is yours.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being here tonight. We definitely value your work and your input into our study.

I'm going to start with Genome Canada.

There's a very specific talent you're looking for. How do we develop a genomics talent strategy for Canada?

[Dr. Robert Annan]

Thank you for the question, Ms. Gladu.

I think it starts really with a foundation and having a strong foundational ecosystem. That includes, certainly, strong support for education in the K-12 system, which I know is not the purview of this committee, including opportunities through things like Let's Talk Science to engage young people from a diverse set of backgrounds in science and research. Then, of course, we have undergraduate education. We have college education. Then we really do need to see support in labs through fundamental kinds of research support more broadly.

From there, students get the opportunities to build more specific skill sets. That's really where we come in. We work with students, as I said, from a variety of backgrounds. Genomics involves a range of skills, backgrounds and technologies, everything from computer science to engineering to all the social sciences I talked about. Really, a lot of people come in from different places, but you also have a lot of needs. We certainly found during the COVID pandemic that a lot of our shortages were in areas involving medical technicians, for instance. Therefore, we do need a broad cross-sectoral focus that includes higher education in the colleges, universities and advanced research labs right across the country. Then we need to target initiatives such as those we do, for instance, at Genome Canada.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Could you talk a little bit about some of the best practices you have to attract and retain the talent you have?

[Dr. Robert Annan]

Sure. I might actually ask my colleague, Pari Johnston, to step in here. Pari is our vice-president of policy and public affairs, and she's really been doing a lot of great work on talent and skills for us.

Pari, maybe I'll ask you to take the floor.

[Pari Johnston, Vice-President, Policy and Public Affairs, Genome Canada]

Sure. Thank you, Rob.

Thank you, Ms. Gladu, for the question. It's really a pleasure to be here at the committee tonight to talk about such a mission-critical initiative for Canada.

With respect to, in our space, strategies for attracting and retaining talent and what some of the best practices are, as Rob mentioned in his remarks, we have a track record of supporting over 6,000 trainees since Genome Canada's founding. One of the critical pieces of success that's really worked in our space is that we engage in partnered research. This means that we're very focused on working with end-users, including industry and other partners, to define their needs right at the outset of the initiatives. That leads then to building up receptor capacity for those students to then go on to be hired.

In fact, in our initiatives we have seen two-thirds of the students who have been out working on our genomics application partnership programs go on to be hired by the very projects on which they worked, so we're building receptor capacity, thanks to the partnered approach we take.

We also are very supportive, through our research programs, in our salaries and stipends for trainees, with 70% of our research programs going to supporting research trainees and researchers. Like the granting councils, we base our investments on important benefits for those students. Our salaries for trainees are indexed to inflation, so they grow with inflationary increases. We also provide parental or maternal benefits as well for those students, similar to those provided by the granting councils.

The final thing I'll say with respect to good practice is what Rob alluded to with respect to inclusive genomics. We're very conscious of the fact that we need to do more to ensure a diverse pipeline into our research programs. We recently implemented a strategy for inclusion, accessibility, diversity and equity to ensure that we're building, through intentional program design, a more systemic change to our policies and programs to promote fairer access and also to ensure that we're fully supporting the range of talent in genomics.

Those are some of the best practices that we are trying to ensure that we build and maintain in order to build the genomics pipeline in Canada.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Excellent. Thank you.

I have a question for Dr. McCauley. You talked about the tri-agency research training award. What value would be a competitive value for that?

[Dr. Edward McCauley]

The great thing about these training awards through the tri-council is that those are opportunities available to students from all across the country, so it really is providing stimulus to enable students to train throughout the regions. I would hate to put a dollar value on it, but what would be good is to look at living wages and how they compare across the country, and then adjust the level of the associated scholarships.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Very good.

Ms. Amyot, colleges are fundamental to creating the talent that we are going to need. There was a comment earlier about medical technologists, and I know we are facing a crisis in this area. I wonder if you could talk about that resource, and maybe some of the others that are getting scarce. How can colleges best play a part to help, and what can we do as a federal government to help you do that?

[Denise Amyot]

You are perfectly right that it is a big issue. All the health sectors, including technicians and technologists, are in need right now. Whether it is radiotherapists or radiologists, it is an issue. What we do, of course, is we train—

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Ms. Amyot, I am so sorry to interrupt. It is the worst part of this. We have these wonderful people.

[Denise Amyot]

I'll send you the answer.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Ms. Gladu would like that, yes. Thank you so much.

With that, we will go to Mr. Chahal for six minutes, please.

[George Chahal, Liberal, Calgary Skyview, AB]

Thank you to all the presenters for your testimony this evening.

It's probably no surprise that I'm going to start with Dr. McCauley from the University of Calgary. I'm from the city of Calgary and an alumnus of the university.

We heard Dr. Mosca talk earlier about the need for collaboration. Dr. McCauley, you actually answered a number of my questions in your opening remarks, but I do want to dive a little deeper.

How does the University of Calgary land with such a great opportunity to collaborate with an international company to bring 1,000 jobs and a centre of excellence to your university? How do you do that, and what's the opportunity for future innovation in that space.

[Dr. Edward McCauley]

The first prerequisite for attracting investment from around the world is talent. We've been very fortunate, as I mentioned, and the federal government has provided incredible supports for helping the University of Calgary to create that talent. Companies have choices in where to go all over the world. They want to go where the talent exists. In that, we're really fortunate.

The second thing is that we have very clear rules of engagement with industries. Our faculty and students want to engage. We have a very clear and simple IP policy that is inventor-owned. We try to reduce all those barriers that might come up in terms of thinking about a partnership.

It really is talent and clear rules of engagement. What we're missing perhaps from the federal government, as I alluded to, is an incentive structure to directly support universities in order to engage in those partnerships, but also clear incentive structures for industries to actually locate in Canada.

[George Chahal, Liberal, Calgary Skyview, AB]

That's exactly where I wanted to go. What can government do to help support? You talked about a coordinated strategic approach and specific scaling support. What does that look like? Could you please provide us with some more information on that?

[Dr. Edward McCauley]

At the University of Calgary, we've created a quite remarkable entrepreneurial structure. Ideas come up and are picked up by different organizations, and in large part our community, through CDL-Rockies and other supports, actually helps to drive company creation. As I mentioned, we're number one in the country right now in terms of company creation, with community support.

If we wanted to scale that to a much larger scale, we might want to look to other jurisdictions, such as the U.K. and Germany, where the governments actually provide support. With a critical set of feedback and constraints, governments directly support the universities in order to build out those partnerships, because that's the important funding that universities need to actually do that. As well, there are incentives for those industries in terms of taxation incentives or in terms of employment credits to actually locate in the country.

[George Chahal, Liberal, Calgary Skyview, AB]

Congratulations to you, the university and Mphasis for bringing 1,000 jobs to our local economy—they were much needed—and for developing the talent and attracting great opportunities from abroad.

How does diversity and multiculturalism impact your ability to attract companies from India and globally to Calgary, and other international students and researchers?

[Dr. Edward McCauley]

Thank you.

Calgary is, fortunately, one of Canada's most diverse cities. We have a variety of communities that willingly open their arms to welcome students, scholars and faculty members from across the world. We're really fortunate in that.

The Canada research chair program that I mentioned earlier is one of those avenues that give universities the ability to recruit from around the world. CRCs and the expansion of the CRC program, which the government has discussed, really help universities to meet their equity, diversity and inclusion targets.

I've worked with MP Duncan on a variety of these in the past, including piloting the dimensions program here at the University of Calgary. We have actually met our requirements for the equity and diversity targets set by the CRC program in 2019 and we will meet them for 2022. This is a program the federal government supports, and we can use it to enhance EDI in attracting diverse scholars.

[George Chahal, Liberal, Calgary Skyview, AB]

Thank you.

I will move over to Genome Canada.

You mentioned the need for a life sciences skills strategy. Could you talk further about what a national strategy would look like?

[Dr. Robert Annan]

Thanks.

I think the life sciences strategy is crucial right now, just because of global competitiveness when it comes to attracting talent. It's no secret that COVID caught everybody a little flat-footed, and suddenly everybody was trying to ramp up everything from testing to therapeutic development to vaccine production and so on. That led to the massive shortages that both Ms. Gladu and Ms. Amyot mentioned in their remarks.

I think step one is recognizing that this is urgent. Step two is taking stock across the country and talking to our companies, public health agencies, hospitals and others to get a sense of where the pressure points and bottlenecks are, not just today but looking down the road five or 10 years. Use that as a basis to work with the ecosystem of institutions as well as funders to help to make sure we're building a pipeline to satisfy those needs.

[George Chahal, Liberal, Calgary Skyview, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you, Mr. Chahal. We're glad that you could join us tonight.

Mr. Blanchette-Joncas, you now have the floor for six minutes.