Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee.
Thank you for inviting me to appear before the committee.
I'm a very grateful beneficiary of the Canadian education system. I was fortunate to study at Oxford. I returned to Waterloo in 1999 as a faculty member to start a quantum computing group within its cryptography centre. I grew this group, and in 2002, we founded the Institute for Quantum Computing. I've helped recruit dozens of the world's top quantum computing researchers as faculty and post-docs, and set up programs that have trained thousands of the top quantum researchers around the world.
While I was setting up this group at Waterloo, I also joined the effort to help found the Perimeter Institute. A decade or so later, it was already ranked among the top theoretical physics centres worldwide. Over a decade ago, I started focusing my energies more on seizing the opportunities we'd been creating, raising awareness about IP protection and management among academics in my field, reaching out to industry on how to protect against quantum-enabled cyber-attacks, and so on. I started my own company. I helped others start their companies, and I started, with others, a quantum industry consortium to help translate research opportunity into economic success for Canada.
Now, to the point of this committee, in short, to attract and retain the best talent, we need to offer people the opportunity to achieve their potential. That's why I left Oxford to return to Waterloo. Waterloo was the perfect place to drive this vision for a world-leading quantum centre at the time, with a very supportive ecosystem that I was joining. There may have been comparable places, but there was no better place.
One of the biggest challenges that we have in translating this opportunity that we create into actual economic prosperity and impact for Canadians is that we are late adopters of this innovation. We keep creating these world-changing opportunities, and then we watch them evaporate in the endgame. We need to tackle that head-on and aggressively. I know we've tried. We've been trying for a long time. We just need to do better.
I have four recommendations.
The first one is to keep supporting what we're good at. We're amazing at creating these opportunities. We do great fundamental research and applied research, great training, start-ups, and incubators. There's room for improvement. We've been hearing about ways we can improve our fundamental research capacity, and of course we should try, but we actually do have a long track record of creating amazing, world-changing opportunities. The next few recommendations are focused on what we can do to better seize those opportunities to retain the talent that we have and attract new talent.
The second recommendation is to stop scoring in our own net. I'll give some examples. The first one is immigration. Just a few weeks ago, a star post-doc in cybersecurity in my group was waiting endlessly for her work permit to be renewed. In the meantime, she was unable to leave Canada, so ultimately she resigned. Europe was certainly happy to have her back. We can give you countless examples of this, and not just recently but over many years.
Another example of own goals is when we set up what at the surface looks like equal collaborations with like-minded partners, but their programs are really optimized for commercialization. Government money flows to companies and they engage our academics, but then we show up and the instruments we bring to the table are really optimized for academic research—which is great for academic research, but there's a mismatch. At the end of the day, we're really risking doing free R and D for others to commercialize. We should not take a knife to a gunfight in these sorts of situations.
The third recommendation is to take a “use it or lose it” approach to the innovation opportunities. We often ask how to keep it here, or how to stop it from leaving. Use it or you're going to lose it. We need to get better at being early adopters again. Jim Collins at Stanford says that great companies fire lots of bullets, and that informs when and where to launch cannonballs. When it comes to disruptive technologies, like quantum, government departments in critical sectors of our economy need to be experimenting early to understand the impact of these technologies on their sectors. Knowing how disruptive tech is going to impact critical sectors of our economy cannot be done with a wait-and-see approach. There's just too much at stake. We need, very importantly, to engage first-in-class Canadian companies whenever possible. That will help us attract and retain first-rate talent.
My final recommendation is that, in a prioritized and principled way, we need to set up a broad team Canada approach to owning the podium in areas we decide are critical for Canada and its strong values to prosper. This involves a mandate for the different elements of the Canadian government, industry, and academia to work together with support from the highest levels of all these sectors—whether it's being a leader in cybersecurity or quantum computing, or whatever we decide—so that we can identify when the existing structures are an obstacle to collective goals and figure out how to get the puck in the net.
Thank you for your attention.
Thank you for your important work on this committee.