Science and Research Committee on Nov. 21st, 2022

[The Right Hon. David Johnston]

Let me focus on the Canadian Space Agency specifically. I could say several things. One is that what impresses me is the international collaboration that has come from Canada's participation with a number of nations, including some who are not necessarily the most friendly nations, with respect to great projects. I think that's really a great triumph of coming together in a scientific endeavour.

When I was at McGill, we had the privilege of the Institute for Air and Space Law, which was created at McGill because it was a centre for international air traffic regulation and association. It was taking advantage of the talent that was there. Developing the new laws that would govern outer space, including where we put space stations, was a very important international collaboration too.

I'm very encouraged by the fact that Canada has been able, in a number of areas of space exploration and development, to really punch above its weight by assessing the talent we have and by being prepared to work in a very collaborative fashion. For me, that's the big response coming from the Space Agency and what we do.

It's not huge amounts of money by comparison with some of the other nations, but it's been very thoughtfully directed, I think, to make an out-of-proportion contribution.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you, Mr. Collins. Thank you, Ms. Sidhu.

Thank you to the witnesses. This is so interesting.

Now we will go to Mr. Blanchette-Joncas.

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

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to welcome the witnesses who are with us for our study this evening.

Mr. Johnston, it's a pleasure to welcome you to the Standing Committee on Science and Research.

In your remarks, you told us about a strategy aimed in particular at encouraging innovation. The strategy would bring international students to Canada and send Canadians students to study outside the country.

I am trying to understand the way you are describing the situation. What I see is based on the following facts. Canada is the only G7 country that has reduced its investments in research and development between 2000 and 2020. It is also the only G7 country that has lost researchers over the past six years, who are potential students. In addition, graduate scholarships for foreign master's and PhD students have not been indexed since 2004. How can you ride a bicycle, if you are missing a wheel, or if you don't have a bicycle at all?

[The Right Hon. David Johnston]

Canada is in a very special position. A survey comparing various cities around the world in terms of student life saw Montreal come out on top, which is good. But it is not just Montreal. A welcoming and quality‑oriented spirit is evident in Quebec and in Canada.

We must work very hard to encourage student exchanges with other countries. I believe it is important that we make an extraordinary effort to make Canada the first choice for international students looking for a place to grow.

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

Thank you for your thoughts.

You will understand that, for Canada to be a welcoming, positive and interesting place to study in, there need to be winning conditions. However, when we compare Canada's R&D investments to those of other countries, it is a fact that Canada is not at the top of the list, but instead near the bottom.

In your remarks, you mentioned international students many times and, in your answer to my question, you talked about the welcoming spirit in Canada and about people's openness.

Let me tell you about a very specific situation in Quebec right now. In Canada, there are supposedly two official languages, with one of them being French. Of course, Quebec can welcome foreign students who speak French. We are seeing, however, an abnormally high number of student visa applications from francophone African countries being rejected.

The federal government even revealed recently that racism and discrimination are evident in the practices, policies, programs and handling of applications at the department of immigration, refugees and citizenship.

Do you have any comments on this? What do you think of the fact that the Canadian government is clearly displaying racism against francophone African students?

[The Right Hon. David Johnston]

One of Canada's very significant assets is that it has tremendous francophone and anglophone institutions. Students therefore have a choice, which influences those who want to study in French or in English and attracts them to Canada. That is extremely valuable.

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

So I understand that you are not condemning those practices. You have no opinion on the fact that the government has adopted discriminatory practices.

[The Right Hon. David Johnston]

I do not really have anything to add.

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

Okay. That's fine.

Mr. Bernstein, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, or CIFAR, coordinates the Pan‑Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, which was launched in 2017. As you know, this strategy is based on three hubs, which are located in Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal. At our last meeting, we had the opportunity to hear from Mr. Yoshua Bengio, a world expert in artificial intelligence, professor at the Université de Montréal and Canada‑CIFAR research chair in artificial intelligence.

Some people have argued that the Pan‑Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy has certain characteristics that could help it qualify as an international moonshot program. What are your thoughts on this?

Which features might make it possible, or not, for it to be designated an international AI moonshot program?

[Dr. Alan Bernstein]

Thank you for your question.

Artificial intelligence is something that computer scientists have dreamed about since computers were first developed after the Second World War. They dreamed of having machines that could, in big quotation marks, actually “think” and do some things on their own, as opposed to whatever we program them to do. They would learn by experience as opposed to by rote.

What Dr. Hinton, Dr. Bengio, Dr. Sutton and their colleagues and students developed was a transformative technology, a transformative science, that in some ways mimics, in a naive way, the way we think the brain works, which is by learning and by experience, to change—

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Dr. Bernstein, I'm sorry to interrupt. I hope that others will pick up the questioning.

I'm sorry, Monsieur Blanchette-Joncas, but your time is over.

We will now go to Mr. Cannings for six minutes.

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

Thank you.

I'd like to thank the witnesses today. We always have interesting witnesses, but it seems that this evening we are really blessed with a wonderful set of people to question.

I would love to talk to Mr. Johnston about his ideas around education and academics. I come from that world as well.

Dr. Bernstein, I'd love to ask you questions about my friend, Pieter Cullis.

However, I will turn to Mr. Klein.

You talked about World War II as an example of what Canada can do and has done when faced with the real demand for a moon shot kind of program.

Could you expand on the scale of military production and economic transformation that Canada did during that time? How did they do it, and how can it inform us today about climate change?

[Seth Klein]

Thank you for your question.

The military production scale in World War II, of course, predates the moon shot, but I think it is an example of a “moonshotesque” program.

Consider this: At the outbreak of the Second World War, Canada had virtually no military production to speak of, yet during the war, the Canadian economy and its labour force pumped out a volume of military equipment that is simply mind-blowing. During those six years, Canada, with a population of less than a third of what it is today, produced 800,000 military vehicles, more than Germany, Italy and Japan combined, and 16,000 military aircraft, ultimately building the fourth-largest air force in the world at the time.

Here, in my province and your province, where we seem to struggle to build a single B.C. ferry anymore, we produced about 350 ships, again from a basis of virtually nothing. Naval architects had to be imported from the U.S and the U.K, and an entire workforce needed to be recruited and trained up. The Vancouver shipbuilders union local went from being a small local of 200 guys to being the single-largest local of men and women in the country.

To give you a sense of the scale, from a population of about 11 million Canadians at the time, over one million Canadians enlisted, and over one million were directly employed in military production.

Most of this transformation occurred under the leadership of C.D. Howe, the most powerful minister in Mackenzie King's wartime government. Interestingly, Howe was an engineer turned politician. He made a lot of money in the private sector before running for office. He became seized with this task. I describe him as an engineer in a hurry. Remarkably, under Howe's leadership, the Canadian government established, during those wartime years, 28 Crown corporations to meet the supply and munitions requirements of the war effort. Howe's department also undertook detailed economic planning and carefully coordinated supply chains in order to prioritize wartime production needs.

In response to the climate emergency, we have seen nothing of this sort. If the government really saw the climate emergency as an emergency, it would, like C.D. Howe did, quickly conduct an inventory of all of our conversion needs to determine how many heat pumps and solar rays and wind farms and electric buses we are going to need to electrify virtually everything and end our reliance on fossil fuels. Then, it would establish a new generation of public corporations to ensure that those items are manufactured and deployed at the requisite scale.

That's the lesson.

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

How would you comment on what we need to do on the interplay between what the government has to do, what industry has to do and what private industry has to do, the spending that needs to be happening there, and how that interplay works out?

As you were saying, we're not winning right now, and we have to put in a lot more effort. I'm just wondering what the government has to do and what role they have to take. I think you hinted at it in your last answer, but can you just expand on that?

[Seth Klein]

We need both government and the private sector, and both have an important role, but in an emergency—I think this is one of the key lessons—we don't allow the private sector to determine the allocation of vital resources. Let me give you an American example from that war story. Consider this: Pearl Harbor happened in December of 1941. In February of 1942, two months later, the last civilian automobile rolled off the assembly line in Detroit, and for the next four years their production and sale were basically illegal.

Those factories were busy and all of those workers were employed, but they were doing something else. They weren't doing that through the voluntary goodwill or patriotism of the big three automakers; they were doing it because they were ordered to do it.

We saw this in the Canadian wartime story as well. We saw over 100 prominent Canadian business leaders in the Second World War become C.D. Howe's dollar-a-year men. They played an instrumental role heading up some of these Crown corporations, serving as what they called controllers of these supply chains. Interestingly, they abandoned their private sector posts to become Howe's dollar-a-year men. They understood that to achieve speed and scale in a time of emergency requires state leadership. I think that's true again today.

We are losing today. We're not spending anything close to what we need to be spending. Sir Nicholas Stern argues that—

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

I'm sorry to interrupt, Mr. Klein.

Mr. Cannings, that's your time. Again, I would like to recognize our witnesses, their time, their expertise and their generosity in being here.

With that, we're going to go to the five-minute round.

We go to Mr. Lobb, please.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

In our last meeting we had, we had a good discussion. One of the points I made was that for a lot of where we need to go, we just don't have the ability to get there at this current juncture. I know our professors are talking about the Herculean efforts of World War II, etc.

This is for you, Mr. Johnston.

You're from a university environment. Think of the case of, say, health care, with our nurses and our doctors. I hear stories all the time from people in my riding whose kids, grandkids or whoever get way over 90% in high school. They got into university, and they got way over 90%. We need family doctors in rural areas, and we need emergency room doctors all over the place. They can get into university, but they can't get into medical school to be a doctor.

Can you give us an idea—I known you have worked almost your whole life in the university environment—of how this is happening?

[The Right Hon. David Johnston]

Very simply, it happened because provincial governments decided they did not want any more medical places, and equally so with other health disciplines. In fact, when I was at McGill, we were in a position of contracting the number of places. McGill went from 160 down to 101 placements in medical school.

At that time, we thought we would be producing enough qualified doctors, including family practitioners and specialists, and we would depend upon immigrants for others. We had difficulty in terms of qualifications with immigrants and so on. I think that's a case where we simply did not respond to the demand of the system and provide opportunities for more young people to have a profession in the health sciences.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Thank you.

I think probably we'd all agree that we need to increase funding for health care so it can be used at the provincial level and also the university level.

The question about another moon shot, depending on how you look at it, is foreign credentials and being able to recognize.... You made some mention about international students and so forth. What about recognizing foreign credentials and looking at a moon shot in that, so people cannot be frustrated with the way things have turned out and they get to work in the field they studied in?

[The Right Hon. David Johnston]

We don't do much of a job on that very subject, profession by profession. We do it somewhat, but not nearly enough in having appropriate, sensitive testing of the backgrounds of the individuals who wish to practise their profession in this country, and then providing appropriate experiential learning, focusing on theoretical learning as necessary, in apprenticeships so that these people are qualified to practise in their professions.

I would add that I think we should do a much greater job in interprovincial qualifications of the various professions. We suffer enormously in this country from having everything focused at the provincial level and not having opportunities for people to practise across jurisdictions. It's just another obstacle that prevents us from having both enough and appropriately qualified people for the needs of the whole country.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

One other topic, just before my time runs out, is that our professors have talked about clean technology, clean energy and renewable energy. I support nuclear, but if you want to build a new reactor or you want to build a new hydrogen plant, or whatever, there's the length of time it takes to get an environmental approval and assessment and actually build whatever it is to help the environment. Is that something we need to look at as a moon shot or a task force to find a way to reduce the assessment time for projects?

[The Right Hon. David Johnston]

Yes, we should do a much better job of regulation, of doing it smartly, thoroughly but promptly, all with a sense of dispatch. I write books about this. I'm doing a sixth edition of Canadian Securities Regulation. Finding that right balance of regulation, which is necessary but efficient, is a very key challenge.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

You have 20 seconds. Would you like to cede your time?

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

I'll cede my time to my colleagues.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you, Mr. Lobb.

With that, we'll go to Ms. Bradford for five minutes, please.