Science and Research Committee on May 19th, 2022

[Joel Blit]

I always worry a bit about government or bureaucrats, or anyone really—myself—picking winners. It's always hard to know what the next big thing is going to be. I think there probably is a limited role for that, but we don't want to put all our eggs into that basket.

The other thing is, if we're picking super high-risk things, one out of 10 will succeed. We're a relatively small country compared to the U.S. and we can place only so many bets, so we might get very little out of that. I—

[Ryan Williams, Conservative, Bay of Quinte, ON]

I'm sorry, I have only limited time.

This is my last question.

Our college system seems to be.... You said there's IP that's put in a drawer. I think we've seen that the IP generated...80% of IP in Canada is through institutions, but it's hard to find that next bridge to commercialization. The college system seems to engage in commercialization with projects already from the private sector.

Do you think we should be looking at more of that angle with our institutions, and then finding ways to bridge that IP?

[Joel Blit]

Absolutely. I think we need to find ways to do that with all of our institutions.

Another model, by the way, is the Waterloo model, where the inventor or the researcher owns the IP. That seems to explain part of the success in this region. If you own it, you have much more incentive to commercialize it than if the benefit goes to someone else.

[Ryan Williams, Conservative, Bay of Quinte, ON]

I agree with that too. Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you, Mr. Williams.

To our witnesses, I really hope you can see the interest you have from this committee.

We're now going to go to Mr. Collins for five minutes, please.

[Chad Collins, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Thanks, Madam Chair.

I have one quick question for Dr. MacLatchy, and then I'm going to cede the rest of my time to my colleague, Mr. Morrice.

Through you to Dr. MacLatchy, we've had only a couple of students appear in front of the committee as witnesses, and their testimony focused around the obvious, in terms of tuition fees, student loans and bursaries. Some of these are cross-jurisdictional issues that we share with the provinces.

What are you hearing from your students as it relates to financial support? What would be the top priority, from a recommendation standpoint and from a funding perspective? I was hoping you could share with us what you're hearing from students at your institution.

[Dr. Deborah MacLatchy]

It is very much what the other speakers have spoken about, which is increasing the dollar value of the scholarships. These scholarships go to our best students, and I think that's a real opportunity. I also think that the number of scholarships has stagnated as well, so it's increasing the numbers.

Tied to that is looking at what additional programs can do to make sure we're getting the widest pool of students, to have access to these students. That includes students who are first-gen students from equity-deserving groups, who need additional supports to see science, technology and innovation as opportunities for them, because they may have had less exposure and fewer opportunities.

[Mike Morrice, Green, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thanks so much, Mr. Collins, for your kindness here, and thank you, Madam Chair. Thanks to all the witnesses as well.

I will admit that I'm particularly proud tonight to see two different witnesses from Waterloo Region, Dr. Blit and Dr. MacLatchy.

I'm hoping I might have time for two questions for Dr. MacLatchy. The first builds on the ones from Mr. Bachrach earlier.

Dr. MacLatchy, I appreciate that you spoke about students who don't have access to generational wealth. I will admit, as a Laurier grad, how helpful it was that my parents were able to help, despite also being in co-op, and how significant that was in helping me get through my undergraduate time there.

You mentioned the need for graduate and post-graduate supports.

Can you share, maybe in a minute or so, some more specifics on the kinds of graduate and post-graduate supports you think the students you mentioned earlier need the most?

[Dr. Deborah MacLatchy]

Yes. I'm actually going to use an undergraduate example.

As part of the NSERC program right now, there are undergraduate awards to support students during summer terms. There is a specific subgroup of that, which is focused on indigenous students. One thing we know about science and technology is that students who get access to research opportunities—especially during their undergraduate studies—are more likely to go on and choose graduate programs—master's and Ph.D. programs.

That kind of very special targeted scholarship for indigenous students is great for researchers and it's great for students. It allows them mentorship and the opportunities to undertake research and get that research bug going, which is really absolutely critical. More programs like this that target.... I know the government has the new scholarships targeted for Black Canadians. Again, I think that is a really strategic way to go to support students who we know are equity deserving and under-represented.

[Mike Morrice, Green, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thanks, Dr. MacLatchy. I hope the committee will take that under advisement.

I have a last question. The grad students' association at Laurier has called out one of their core needs, and it is with respect to the cost of housing. Recognizing how that's gone through the roof across Waterloo Region and across the country, I wonder if you could speak to that so this committee could maybe keep in mind how, if we're thinking about keeping the best talent in Canada, we also need to address the cost of housing.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Mr. Morrice, I'm sorry. I hate to do this. Since you're out of time, perhaps you'd like to ask Dr. MacLatchy if she might like to table that.

[Taylor Bachrach]

I'll give her time to answer in my time when it comes up.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

I'm afraid that this will be the end of the panel.

Would you like to ask?

[Mike Morrice, Green, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Yes.

Dr. MacLatchy, if you wouldn't mind sharing that in written material afterwards, it sounds like that's the only way the committee can accept it.

Thanks, Mr. Bachrach, for your attempt.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you for your kindness.

As you see, this is a very collegial committee.

It's my job to say thank you to all of you. I hope you've had a good experience. It's wonderful to see parliamentarians able to meet with the research community.

Dr. Blit and Dr. LaMontagne, we wish you good luck with your research.

Dr. MacLatchy and Dr. Perreault, we will be watching your institutions.

We thank you for being with us tonight. Thank you for your expertise and your experience, and for being so gracious.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Good evening. We're delighted to welcome our next panel tonight.

We have, from adMare BioInnovations, Mr. Gordon McCauley, president and chief executive officer, and Dr. Youssef Bennani, chief scientific officer, and from the Banting Research Foundation, Dr. Catharine Whiteside, who is the chair.

To our witnesses, we want to welcome you. We're delighted that you can have a conversation with us tonight. We look forward to hearing your expertise.

Each group will be given five minutes. After four and a half minutes, I will hold up a yellow card, which will tell you that you have 30 seconds left. We aim to be fair.

We will begin with adMare BioInnovations.

Welcome. The floor is yours.

[Gordon McCauley, President and Chief Executive Officer, adMare BioInnovations]

Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here this evening with my colleague, Dr. Youssef Bennani.

We're here because Canada has an extraordinary research enterprise that punches well above its weight when measured against our competitors around the world. We're only now just beginning to build a sustainable life sciences industry. We, adMare, exist to do just that, so we play a leadership role in building companies, building ecosystems and building talent. We build companies by finding compelling science in typically Canadian academic settings and bringing it into our own labs to build investable companies.

Our team has a tremendous track record of doing this. We've helped build 27 companies that have attracted 1.4 billion dollars' worth of real risk capital, which are worth about $3 billion today, and which employ about 1,000 Canadians.

We build ecosystems, both physically and virtually. Our innovation centres in Montreal and Vancouver are home to 40 emerging companies employing about 500 Canadians, and our adMare community digital ecosystem is home to about 1,500 active members.

Most pertinent to this discussion is the work we do in building talent. We do this through the adMare Academy, which has five key programs that actively and successfully build the talent that we see is needed in the Canadian life sciences industry. The executive institute is focused on a 10-month gender-balanced program to build the leadership talent required. Our adMare BioInnovations scientist program is focused on the front end, post-doctoral and master's students, and helping them to apply their expertise in a commercial setting. We have a fellowship program for post-doctoral students and a co-op program for undergrads. Finally, the Canadian Alliance for Skills and Training in Life Sciences, or CASTL, provides the global gold standard in biomanufacturing training.

We are very proud of these programs, and we know they work. Ninety-five per cent of the more than 500 alumni of the adMare Academy work in the Canadian life sciences industry today.

These programs are being developed as a result of the recent record levels of investment from Canada's private sector. We are talking about literally billions of dollars invested over the past few years. And we mustn't forget record investment levels in public policy, from many different standpoints. These major capital investments represent significant job opportunities for Canadians.

Serious investment also means that Canada is facing a serious shortage of life sciences talent to drive that growth. Our friends at BioTalent Canada tell us that during the pandemic, this industry added 8,500 jobs in 2020 and is poised to have 214,000 over the next few years. We doubt that the committee needs reminding that these are high-value, high-paying, sustained jobs, situated at the heart of the economy of the future.

What should we do to help encourage this growth and seize this opportunity? We'd like to suggest five areas of focus.

First, just look around our facilities in Montreal or Vancouver and you will know that Canada is a highly sought-after destination for highly trained international students and seasoned experts. We need to continue the programs to attract these students and experts. We know they're working, including through the express entry program. We can improve them, for sure, but we need more of these students.

Second, tuition subsidies to students and wage subsidies to employers will go a long way toward ensuring the rapid uptake of our existing programs to meet existing demand.

Thirdly, internships, like those in our postdoctoral and co‑op programs, are very effective at contributing to student employment, and they need strong support and encouragement.

Fourth, our universities and colleges do outstanding jobs, and we should ensure that their work and the work of supportive organizations like the tri-council are fully supported.

Fifth, scale is incredibly important. Our global competition is much larger. We cannot afford to take a piecemeal approach across the country. The data show that piecemeal efforts have not worked in the past, and our pan-Canadian effort clearly does.

Many of these jobs cannot be done remotely, because they're in laboratories, but surely the pandemic has shown us that we can do this effectively where remote work is possible. Therefore, ensuring that Canadians have the tools and infrastructure to do this work from anywhere is critical.

We thank you for the invitation and for the ongoing public policy support of our work. We'd be delighted to answer questions, if necessary.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you so much, Mr. McCauley. We appreciate your being here.

I'm going to go to the Banting Research Foundation, with Dr. Whiteside. Our third guest has joined us, but we'll give our guest a second.

Dr. Whiteside, the floor is yours for five minutes. Welcome.

[Dr. Catharine Whiteside, Chair, Banting Research Foundation]

Madam Chair and members of the standing committee, thank you for this opportunity to be a witness for this very important topic of talent, research and innovation, which directly aligns with the core mission of our foundation.

Since 1925, our not-for-profit national foundation has identified early-career researchers in health and biomedicine across Canada within the first three years of their first faculty appointment, to support their bold ideas and help launch their careers. To date, we've funded over 1,300 young health and biomedical researchers in all fields, ranging from biomedical engineering to public health—totalling $8.6 million—at universities across Canada, through our annual discovery awards program. Our alumni, including such luminaries as Janet Rossant and Henry Friesen, have gone on to secure major research funding and make outstanding discoveries. They have emerged as Canada's leaders in biomedical science.

I have the privilege of chairing this foundation and wish to share with you our concern about the gap in federal support for our young research talent in health and biomedicine research in Canada, as well as our recommendations to address this gap.

Canada faces significant health challenges that impact individuals, our health care systems and our economy. Our most urgent health challenges include recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and the potential next pandemic, climate change, complex diseases such as diabetes, and an aging population. Successfully addressing these challenges to ensure a healthy population and economy requires investing in the people who will generate innovative solutions, driven in large part by the biomedical academic research community.

Our federal government has invested in the training of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, whose bold ideas are often the most innovative within this community. I'm quite aware of the advocacy for increased funding for this group. However, relative to peer countries, including the U.K., Australia, Germany and, importantly, the United States, Canada is underinvesting in science—specifically in early-career researchers in health and biomedicine who have been hired as assistant professors within the first five years of their academic careers.

Unlike other countries, our federal granting agencies do not provide many early-career researchers with competitive funding that would be sufficient to attract our best and brightest post-doctoral fellows to Canadian research faculty positions. The CIHR discontinued its early-career research award program in 2014. A review of the CIHR Banting post-doctoral fellows since 2014 indicates that 35% were recruited to a faculty position outside of Canada, which represents a significant loss of top discovery talent.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. For decade after decade, we have been losing many of our most talented researchers, who have been scooped up elsewhere because Canada cannot compete with the initial salary and research funding offered by other countries. Our Banting discovery awardees, many of whom have trained abroad in some of the most prestigious research centres across the globe, indicate that although they accepted a faculty position in Canada having rejected more lucrative offers from elsewhere, they know many Canadian colleagues who accepted these offers, which are mostly in the United States.

The first five years are the most difficult for early-career researchers, who must juggle setting up their independent research programs, acquiring competitive grant funding, establishing new families and dealing with a university teaching load. For MDs, there are new clinical care responsibilities. It is particularly difficult for women and those who may be struggling with financial debt—some from lower socio-economic backgrounds—after many long years of training.

This raises the issue of equity, diversity and inclusion within our young research talent pool, particularly when we know that the research necessary to address our health inequalities in Canada, such as indigenous people's health challenges, must engage investigators from our diverse communities with lived experiential knowledge.

Therefore, underinvesting in early-career researchers negatively impacts population health, health care resiliency, the competitiveness of the Canadian economy and, ultimately, our ability to effectively attract and retain the talent we need for innovation and its implementation.

Our foundation, along with the Dr. Charles H. Best Foundation, has developed a proposal for a $100-million federal investment over the next 10 years for the recruitment and retention of investigators in health and biomedicine within the first five years of their initial faculty appointments. We have presented this proposal to 26 federal decision-makers and—

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Dr. Whiteside, I hate to interrupt, especially as you're getting to—

[Dr. Catharine Whiteside]

I'm finished. I'll just say that our proposal has received a very positive response.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

I'm sure the members will want to follow up and hear more of what you have to say. Thank you for that.

The last witness we're going to hear from in this panel is Dr. Mosca, who is a professor with the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo.

The floor is yours for five minutes. Welcome.

[Dr. Michele Mosca, Professor, Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo, As an Individual]

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.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you so much, Dr. Mosca.

I'd like to thank all of our witnesses. Thank you for coming and having a conversation with us tonight, and thank you for sharing your expertise, your ideas, and where the challenges are. We have a very interested committee. They want to ask you questions, so we'll go to questions now.

The first round is for six minutes, and we begin with Mr. Tochor.

The floor is yours.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our witnesses tonight.

Thank you, Dr. Mosca. I have some questions for you, because we heard from the Perimeter Institute last week and I was very interested in how they are approaching things. You are along the same lines, stressing the importance of being a disruptive technology out there. I do appreciate some of your comments, but I just want you to unpack a couple of them.

One is about bringing a knife to a gunfight. Is that strictly just on funding from the federal government?