Science and Research Committee on Feb. 8th, 2022

[Dr. Vivek Goel, President and Vice-Chancellor, University of Waterloo]

Thank you.

It's wonderful to see this House of Commons committee being established. Congratulations to all of you on your appointments.

Thanks for the opportunity to appear this evening.

I'm a public health physician researcher, and prior to my current appointment, I spent a year directly working on the pandemic research response. I was one of those people who pivoted, not just in my research but actually in my administrative career.

We only have to look at that response to see the return on investment in science and research, and Dr. Patry has just highlighted one very important example. Scientists, researchers and public health experts have played critical roles in advising and leading the response, from sitting on advisory committees to pivoting their research to COVID-related studies.

It's the support for fundamental research over many years that provided the foundation for that expertise to be there when we needed it. We certainly think a lot about the contribution of science to the response, such as the development of vaccines and treatments, but there are so many other areas. For example, social scientists have played a role in addressing vaccine hesitancy, economists in assessing the impact of pandemic measures, and medical geographers and historians in understanding past pandemics, such as this committee's chair has done.

Canada's support for science and research has yielded some very crucial competitive advantages, notably in quantum and AI, but as you have heard, we are at risk of falling behind other countries. Stable research funding is essential, but we also need stable programs. As Dr. Pomeroy has noted, new programs are constantly created with new acronym soups. These programs are often designed with the legitimate desire for impacting on pressing issues or contributing to the economy, but the design of the programs often misses the importance of fundamental research. We often focus on narrow research areas, and we push specific types of partnerships.

The reality is impact is achieved through broad interdisciplinary work, through partnerships and collaboration and through knowledge mobilization. That knowledge mobilization happens most significantly through the talent we produce, the master's and Ph.D. graduates who take their research experiences out into society. Our research also impacts on policies and practices, and we have an impact through commercialization.

All too often we jump straight to commercialization as the sole means of impact. It's also important to recognize that for commercialization to be successful, we need receptors, and as has been noted, our business investment in research and development is very low. Without that kind of capacity on the business side, we won't be able to get the innovations.

In the Waterloo region, we have developed examples of how this can work. My university is a leader in areas such as quantum, cybersecurity, nanotechnology and robotics, and this has benefited from many decades of investment by governments. However, we are also working to apply many of these technologies and digital strengths with entrepreneurs to new innovations. The region has built an ecosystem that is fostering the further development and application of such technologies. We can apply these technologies to our biggest challenges such as climate change or the aging population, or preparing for future pandemics.

Waterloo is one of the fastest-growing regions in the country, largely because of the innovation ecosystem that is underpinned by world-class research. We are well positioned to continue to help drive our economic renewal and growth.

As we look to move forward past the pandemic, building a country of innovative, equitable and resilient communities with an eye to environmental sustainability, health and wellness and technologically advanced societies, universities and our research have a central role to play. We look forward to working with the committee to advance these goals.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you, Dr. Goel.

Now we are on the six-minute round of questioning, and we'll have MP Williams.

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

Thank you very much, everyone, for joining us tonight.

Mr. Pomeroy, I'm going to start with you.

I come from a rural region of Canada. Saskatchewan is very rural, as is Canada. Of all the 4,000 municipalities in Canada, 3,790 are rural. Of the rest, only 94 are urban.

Can you tell me what you've seen and what you're studying? How important is rural innovation, commercialization and research in rural Canada, including indigenous areas as you've mentioned, compared to just our urban centres?

[Dr. John Pomeroy]

It's absolutely crucial for the survival and prospering of rural regions. My focus has been water, so we look at irrigation, drinking water supplies or groundwater, but also agricultural practices that can better manage water and ways to harvest water, in unique methods.

The communities benefit substantially from this when they have a better means to their economy, when their ecosystems can remain intact. So many people in rural Canada, from indigenous to others, will have a lifestyle that involves hunting and fishing, as well as appreciation of nature. That's also critically important for these areas and it's something that gets forgotten sometimes.

We see it now with the pandemic, the exodus of people from the cities to our rural regions. We want to make sure that these are welcoming places, that these are sustainable communities that can help build the rest of this century and the country. Not everything will be occurring in the large cities.

The innovation of rural residents is something well known in Saskatchewan. I've always felt that the best graduate student in the world was a Saskatchewan farm child who knew how to fix things on the farm and could do the same in the Arctic or in a laboratory or elsewhere.

There's a wealth of capacity that comes from rural Canada that will be crucial for our science moving forward.

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

Thank you very much, sir.

Dr. Patry, we talk about IP. It's great to hear that, of the U15, almost 80% of research and patents come from that group.

Canada, in 2019, developed 39 billion dollars' worth of IP, but the U.S. did $6.6 trillion, so 169 times ours.

How do we begin to catch up with the U.S. on IP development?

[Dr. Gilles Patry]

This is one of the big challenges. One of the things we'd like to do is to analyze the patterns that are happening in business right now, and we have to admit that over the last 20 years, business expenditures in R and D, where most of the intellectual property is generated, have been decreasing at an alarming rate. While the rest of the world has been increasing their investments in R and D, in terms of business investment in R and D in Canada, that has fallen. We're now at 1.54% of GDP, which explains some of the statistics that you've just highlighted.

We've had many studies that have looked at this in the past, and I think there needs to be a bit more action in terms of the SRED credits. This is a personal view; it's not the U15 view. We do a lot of SRED credits in terms of assistance and providing credits, whereas many other countries, like Germany, do direct investments in industry and assist them through direct programs to be more competitive globally.

I know that every government has looked at that, but there's been very little movement on the SRED credit program in recent years. I'm sure my other colleagues might have some other ideas on this also, Mr. Williams.

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

Thank you. I know it's very complicated. I wish I had 10 minutes with you all.

Dr. Goel, we've had issues in Canada for a long time about a brain drain. A lot of graduates, including from the University of Waterloo, get picked up by the United States. How do we stop the brain drain? How do we draw more talent, and how do we have more retention of our talent in Canada?

[Dr. Vivek Goel]

Certainly on the science and research side, building on Dr. Patry's point, we need more investment by the private sector to hire those people. The reason those people go is they can get jobs in other countries in the disciplines they've been trained in.

In recent years, we have had shifting. Certainly in Waterloo in recent years more of the graduates are staying in Canada, but in part that's because the multinationals have figured out that they can set up here, hire the graduates and not have to pay for them to move. That is an important step because it helps to build the ecosystem. Having those jobs for people when they graduate means they'll get experience at a multinational, and then they might go to work for a Canadian firm or start their own firm, and they haven't moved to Silicon Valley or some other part of the world.

Really, the starting point is going to be that we have to create more opportunities for those Canadian graduates to stay in Canada.

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

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you.

Moving on, we'll have MP Bradford for six minutes.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you very much, Dr. Pomeroy, Dr. Patry and Dr. Goel, for being generous with your time this evening and offering your expert opinions from your various perspectives.

I'll direct this first question to you, Dr. Goel, because you partly alluded to it in your previous address.

Many countries, including Canada, have recently announced strategies and significant investments in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum and genomics. What can we do to ensure that we empower institutions leading in this research so that they compete in these emerging areas?

As I said, you alluded to it before, but maybe you could expand on what else we could do. Obviously, funding is critical, but there are probably other things as well.

[Dr. Vivek Goel]

Yes. Critically, regarding the stability of the funding, and Dr. Pomeroy referred to this, we have different cycles of programs that lead to people having to constantly reinvent themselves. As we develop strategies such as the pan-Canadian AI strategy, the new quantum strategy, and with genomics we have Genome Canada, we need to ensure that the things we invest in have stable, continuous funding.

As I think was hinted at by the previous witnesses, we also need to look at the coordination between programs. While there are great opportunities with having separate funding sources for people, with chairs programs, the operating grants programs, the infrastructure programs through CFI, and then the research support fund, which supports the infrastructure that enables research, it can also be very challenging for researchers because they have to line up all the different funding that often has competitions at different points in time and different windows of what is eligible.

In other countries, there's program funding that enables researchers to get everything they need almost through a one-stop type of process. That's where we need to really think about how we can coordinate all these disparate funding sources in a better way and then focus them on a few of these areas where Canada has the chance to truly lead. As you mentioned, AI, quantum and nanotechnology are some of those areas.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you.

Building on that, I'd like to hear from each of you on this: What do you feel are some of the biggest challenges and opportunities in regard to working with the government's granting councils?

We can go in the same order that you presented before.

Dr. Pomeroy, would you like to start?

[Dr. John Pomeroy]

Thank you.

Many of the problems we face in Canada are interdisciplinary. They go further than the natural sciences and engineering, medicine, or social sciences and humanities alone, and they require an interdisciplinary or maybe a transdisciplinary approach, moving outside universities into the private sector, public sector and communities. That's very hard when we have separate agencies with separate funding streams that they wish to support.

We have a few things, such as the Canada first research excellence fund, which is interdisciplinary, but probably not enough. More of that would be very helpful.

The other thing is the long-term support that is necessary to build these research programs and to keep our capacity in Canada. Remember, when these research networks stop for a year, we lose all our post-docs, graduate students and others. Where do they go? It's probably not in Canada. That's when we leak them overseas. We need to keep that steady momentum together for these groups to keep people here in Canada, so undergraduates know what their trajectory might be in this country because of that longer term prospect.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Dr. Patry.

[Dr. Gilles Patry]

So as not to repeat what Dr. Goel and Dr. Pomeroy have just indicated, one of the things I'll say is that research is a contact sport. Research is the interactions of researchers, of students and of the business sector coming together, again, with government researchers. One of the things we've been advocating is to ensure that government researchers are able to work seamlessly with researchers in our universities and also in industry. That's one way of accelerating our discovery processes.

To reiterate what was mentioned, it's very important to ensure that programs have stability. This is probably what was being referred to when we were looking at examining the coordination between agencies, to ensure that, number one, agencies work together.

I used to be the president of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, funding the research infrastructure in universities, research hospitals and colleges. I think it's time for the three granting councils, CFI and Genome Canada to work in a more coordinated fashion going forward.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you very much. That's the end of that section.

We're going to move to MP Blanchette-Joncas.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Let me welcome the witnesses who are joining us this evening.

My first question is for Mr. Patry.

Mr. Patry, first of all, I would like to thank you for your work with the Group of Canadian Research Universities. I know that you will be leaving your position next April. I would like to thank you for all your work and to congratulate you. It is a pleasure to welcome you this evening.

I have read your recommendations in your pre-budget submission for the 2022 federal budget. I was particularly struck by recommendation number 2 on Canada's investment in research and development.

As we know, Canada is losing ground and falling behind. Compared to our neighbours, the United States and other OECD and G7 countries, in terms of investment as a percentage of GDP, Canada is falling behind. This obviously reduces competitiveness.

I'm trying to see what consequences this has on the ground and in the universities. How is Canada doing in terms of not investing enough in research and development?

[Dr. Gilles Patry]

I would say that it is primarily companies that do not invest enough internally in research and development.

Several studies have been done on this. One of them, from the Council of Canadian Academies, simply said that companies have been innovative to the point where they should be. In short, when you have access to support programs, it's often better to take the grants that come your way than to become very competitive and invest in research and development. That was in the early 2000s and 2010s, perhaps.

What we need to do now is to give the industrial sector a new boost. In addition, as I referred to earlier, we need to review the research assistance program, the so‑called SR&ED tax credits, and modify it slightly. Some have suggested that it be modified to provide ad hoc assistance to certain companies in certain sectors.

I always say that there are three important elements to activate industrial research.

First, we must invest in places where there is expertise in Canada. We must build on the expertise we have.

Secondly, we must ensure that these are large markets. We are talking about billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Finally, we want to ensure that these investments are profitable in Canada. If it is a manufactured product, we must ensure that it is manufactured in Canada so that it can create jobs in Canada. There is little point in developing new knowledge if it is to be exploited elsewhere, in other countries.

For me, these are three elements that have served other countries well, such as Germany and England. We have good models to follow in these countries.

I also think it is important to encourage and foster partnerships between industry and universities. My field of research is also water, as I work in wastewater treatment. As a researcher, you have to make sure that what you are developing can benefit society, and having these partnerships between industry and universities is crucial.

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

Thank you for your clarification, Mr. Patry.

You also made an excellent point in the brief that the global race for scientific achievement is accelerating. Governments are increasingly taking into account the real links between research and economic growth, but also national competitiveness.

Canada is the only G7 country to have lost researchers. Why is this? Is it because the funding is not adequate enough or because it has not been supported enough in recent years?

[Dr. Gilles Patry]

As I said earlier in my remarks, I have done this analysis many times and I would be willing to pass it on to the committee; it is very easy to see what has happened over the last 20 years.

You know, two elements are important. On the one hand, there are the inflation costs, which are particularly important. This year, with inflation at 3.5% this year, or even 4% next year, it will be dramatic. Secondly, there is the pressure on the system. This pressure comes from inflation, but it also comes from growth. Fortunately, we have had quite a lot of growth in the area of PhD students, but not enough to be competitive.

As I said earlier, Canada ranks 28th among OECD countries in terms of the number of master's and doctoral degree holders. As a result of this growth, at about 3.5% per year, the good years for research were from 2002 to 2008—and I had the good fortune and pleasure of being a university president back then. At that time, there was funding following the launch of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, or CFI, the Canada Research Chairs, or CRC, Genome Canada, and so on. There was a lot of potential. We have regressed since then, to the point where we are now at the same level, and even lower, than in 2000.

So there are significant investments to be made in basic research, in the three granting councils, the CFI, and Genome Canada.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you so much.

Now we'll move to MP Cannings.

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

Thanks again to all of you for being here. It's a real honour to have you. I must admit, I don't think I've seen so many Order of Canada pins before a committee in one single meeting. It's truly an honour.

I'm going to start with Dr. Patry.

Thanks for mentioning my friend Pieter Cullis and his work on lipid coating in mRNA. I really appreciate that. It shows what Canada can do.

You mentioned how important fundamental research is, but you also touched on the support for grad students who are master's and Ph.D students. Many years ago, almost 50 years ago, I received an NSERC scholarship that allowed me to go to a university and study biology, so I appreciate that. However, in talking to my colleagues now in the biology field, they point out that funding from NSERC, and perhaps the other councils, hasn't gone up in many years. Those rates have been stagnant and it's not surprising that young people are perhaps looking elsewhere.

I wonder if you would comment on that aspect. You touched on it. I would ask you to mention it again.

[Dr. Gilles Patry]

Absolutely. Thank you very much for the question, because it's something that we did put in our brief that Monsieur Blanchette-Joncas made reference to.

You can invest in research in two different ways. Well, you can in many ways, but one is by providing funding to the granting councils, which is obviously one of the great ways. The second way of investing is to invest directly in students through scholarships, graduate scholarships, what we call the CGS, the Canada graduate scholarships program.

You're absolutely right. The number and the value of these scholarships has been stagnant for at least 15 years. We've been advocating for a tripling of the number of graduate student scholarships. This would achieve two things. We're talking about diversity. We're talking about equity, diversity and inclusion a lot, but by investing in graduate students, we can target these graduate scholarships to students in designated groups, number one, but also in disciplines, if you want to go that far. We've certainly advocated for a significant increase in the number and the value.

I'm sure your analysts can provide you with the numbers, but when you look at the investments that are being contemplated in the U.S. right now, it is scary. I've made reference to it in my remarks. We've already seen a bit of an exodus right now. All university presidents can point to one or two individuals who have now been lured to the U.S., to Germany, to the U.K. or to Japan because of the significant investments that are made in the postpandemic era, or at least what we think or hope will be the postpandemic era.

We're at the edge of having a 1990 type of situation. We're not there yet, as I said, but we have to be a lot more aggressive. We have to support investments in graduate students and in the granting councils directly.

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

Thank you.

I would like to quickly move to Dr. Pomeroy.

Dr. Pomeroy, you made quite an interesting statement. You said that you wouldn't want to be a government scientist right now. Could you perhaps expand on that and explain why that might not be a good place to be?