Science and Research Committee on Feb. 8th, 2022

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

We might have a technical problem.

Dr. Nemer, we're out of time on that round.

[Dr. Mona Nemer]

[Technical difficulty--Editor] ought to be an integral part of these conversations.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you, Dr. Nemer.

Technology issues happen to the best of us from time to time.

We are going to move into the next round of questioning, of two and a half minutes.

First up is Mr. Blanchette.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

My question is for Ms. Nemer.

Ms. Nemer, I have assessed your responsibilities. In the description of your mandate, it says that you are to assess and recommend ways to improve the science advisory function within the federal government.

We also know that the Naylor report recommended the creation of an independent national advisory council on research and innovation. This was implemented in 2019 and people were recruited, but we have not heard anything further from the government afterwards.

Do you know the status of the implementation of this council?

[Dr. Mona Nemer]

I'm sorry, but I don't know.

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

Okay.

In your last report, published in February 2020 and entitled Roadmap for “Open Science,” you recommended that Canada adopt “an Open Science approach to federally funded scientific and research outputs.”

Can you tell us about the progress made since the publication of your report?

[Dr. Mona Nemer]

I am happy to answer this question, especially as we have just published online yesterday the results of our consultations with scientists and researchers, but also with those who fund research in Canada and abroad.

We are making good progress on the “Roadmap for Open Science.” Within the federal government, we asked that the various departments each have an action plan. They now have all had action plans for six months, and several have even posted them.

We now need to think about developing a countrywide approach, both inside and outside government. We are currently working on how best to do this in an internationally harmonized way, as most of the grants for coordinated research come from several places.

There is certainly a lot of support for open science from researchers across the country.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you so much, Dr. Nemer.

We're moving to Mr. Cannings.

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

Thanks. I will stay with Dr. Nemer for this quick round.

You mentioned in your opening remarks that one of your priorities was to create and/or cultivate an open science ecosystem. Could you expand on that and let the committee know what an open science ecosystem is?

[Dr. Mona Nemer]

Open science, of course, involves a number of things. It's open publications. It's open access to data. It's the ability to openly engage with the public. There are different dimensions.

Towards those objectives, my office recommended the adoption of a science integrity policy, which was done by all major science-based departments and agencies, and there is the commitment to open science and to open data.

The first phase was to do the open publishing, because that's the easier part, and then move on to having the majority of the data that is within the federal government, whether it's observational data or research data—of course with exceptions that we have also provided guidelines on—be open as well.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Mr. Cannings, keep your question brief, please.

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

I have a quick question for Dr. Runte.

Could you, in very short order, explain how your role at CFI differs from the other three granting councils of the federal government?

[Dr. Roseann O'Reilly Runte]

The three granting councils are part of the government; we are at arm's length from the government. We fund the research infrastructure; they fund the people.

We provide the infrastructure to institutions, because when you purchase a piece of infrastructure or you build something, an individual researcher can't do that. It has to be done by an institution. Also, we provide only 40-cent dollars, whereas the councils provide more.

If we provide 40-cent dollars, it means that the provinces have to come in and be persuaded to put in 60%, or another 40% and then 20% from perhaps private enterprise or institutions.

You can't have hundreds of researchers doing that. Institutions have to take that on.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you so kindly.

We're going to move to Mr. Baldinelli.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for being here today. It's a pleasure to have you as our first witnesses on our new committee.

I want to begin with Dr. Nemer and follow up on a conversation that my Bloc colleague had put forward with regard to a national advisory council on research and innovation. It was one of the recommendations of the Naylor report that has yet to be followed up on by the government.

You talked about the ecosystem foundation being critical to science and research and innovation moving forward. We don't have that research and innovation advisory council. Do you believe it is key to helping develop that ecosystem?

[Dr. Mona Nemer]

Well, different countries of course have different variations of these science and technology councils or other designations. They're helping in providing strategic advice to government in terms of either areas that need further attention or specific activities. Usually they have people from the private sector, as well as from academia and government, so they're generally viewed as very helpful.

During the pandemic, I put together an expert committee to advise us on the important areas for science and actions for the pandemic. You could do it by sector or you can have one that looks at the broad ecosystem for the country.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls, ON]

Thank you.

Just to follow up, the mandate letter for the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry that was published in December indicated that he:

work with the Minister of Health to develop a plan to modernize the federal research funding ecosystem to maximize the impact of investments in both research excellence and downstream innovation, with a particular focus on the relationships among the federal research granting agencies and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

It seems very similar to one of the recommendations, I think it's recommendation 4.10, that the Naylor report talks about.

Therefore, are we tending to say that the system in place right now is too bureaucratic? Is it too cumbersome for those stakeholders that we're dealing with in their relationship with government to undertake the research and those scientific projects that we ultimately need?

[Dr. Mona Nemer]

We have a system that has served us well over the years, but again, it's not perfect and it needs to keep up with the way science is developing and also the needs of the country in terms of translating discoveries or focusing on specific areas.

I think every business every now and then looks at how they're doing business. Sometimes they find out that they're doing great and other times they tweak what they're doing. Other times they remove certain activities and other times they add some. My understanding would be that such a self-evaluation is not a bad thing.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls, ON]

Thank you, Doctor.

I think that's time now.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you kindly for the presentations and the answers that you have provided.

We will suspend the meeting for two minutes to do sound checks on the next panel.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Welcome back everybody.

We will hear first from Dr. Pomeroy.

[Dr. John Pomeroy, Distinguished Professor and Canada Research Chair, University of Saskatchewan, As an Individual]

Thank you so much.

It's a great pleasure to be speaking to this committee. It's a great pleasure that there is such a committee for Canada. It's absolutely marvellous to focus on science and research.

I'll introduce myself briefly. I completed my graduate and undergraduate training in water sciences at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. I then worked for NATO and the U.S. and Canadian governments as a research scientist, and then at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth in the United Kingdom. I was attracted back to Canada in 2003 by a renewed science and research strategy that led to the Canada research chairs program and a substantial increase in tri-council funding for academics.

This made Canada a warm welcoming place where one could more confidently pursue large-scale, world-class research. Since that time, I've led or co-led five national research networks and some international initiatives. I conduct research on water, particularly the impacts of climate change on water resources of cold regions such as Canada, where snow and ice are vulnerable to the warming temperatures.

I come from Saskatchewan and the prairie provinces, where drought is always on the horizon. We even have dust storms occurring in the Prairies this week. It's a massive issue for the west. How we manage, predict and steward that water, how we understand it and make sure it's available for our ecosystems, communities and indigenous communities for food production, industry and energy is a very important issue for us.

Over the years, I've observed Canada building up a really enviable system of supporting and encouraging university-based science and research. The dependence on university researchers for science production in Canada has grown. I started off as a government scientist, but I wouldn't want to be one right now as budgets have declined over the decades.

It's better at the universities. However, there's a risk to this dependence on the universities as it's structured right now. We lack the long-term means to sustain our national prominence in research areas. Other countries have these mechanisms in place.

Here's what I mean: In the UK, NERC centres combine academic and government research on strategic topics over long periods of time—decades. In the United States, there are co-operative institutes between the federal government and universities that function over decades and sustain long-term research objectives. In Canada, we don't have this.

My colleagues and I have worked on issues of water, climate and water pollution since the early 1990s. It's been made even more pressing by climate change. We found that we've had to establish six different research networks across the country to do this with five different research funding agencies. We call ourselves “acronym surfers” because every five years or so, we have to reinvent ourselves a bit. We have to learn a new funding agency and we have to bring in new sources of support for this.

It's precarious. It's also inefficient and takes long periods of time. It's a great worry. We know that water is life. We know that Canada depends on water. We can go back to John Palliser's expedition in the 1850s where this first came to prominence as a government report. This is something that should be straightforward moving forward.

Right now, the network I lead is called global water futures. It's funded by the Canada first research excellence fund, which has a marvellous amount of funding for science research. It's based at the University of Saskatchewan in partnership with Waterloo, Laurier and McMaster universities. It funds over 200 professors at 18 universities. We've hired 1,100 students and researchers to transform Canada by finding ways to better forecast, prepare for and manage our future water in the face of dramatically increasing risk.

Global water futures is positioning Canada as a global leader for water science and we work throughout the world. However, after a seven-year run, global water futures will end next year like any CFREF network and there are no renewals. There are no similar large science funding programs that could sustain our refreshed global leadership in water science in Canada.

This is a precarious position indeed. I propose a solution to acronym surfing and research instability like this; not more big chairs to bring in people from outside of Canada to do things at the end of their careers, but sustained collaboration between the federal government and universities to develop our own co-operative institutes between consortia of research universities, federal government departments, provinces, industry, communities, first nations and other partners. These co-operative institutes would sustain a long-term focus on issues of long-term national importance, and bring to bear our national scientific resources, our laboratories, on these issues to sustain big science and global pre-eminence in strategic areas of particular benefit to Canada.

In the area of water, perhaps the upcoming Canada water agency could be a federal facilitator and leader for this, along with the natural science departments, tri-council agencies, CFI and others, like a Canadian co-operative institute in water sustainability with the universities. I'm sure there are many other worthy topics of this long-term strategic support in collaboration between federal science departments and universities across this country.

We could stop acronym surfing and get down to answering the really dangerous and scary questions that we have right now, such as how we predict and prevent floods, droughts, the poisoning of our Great Lakes, the decline of our fisheries, safe drinking water for our indigenous communities and other problems.

I'll wrap up there and I look forward to taking questions from you. Thank you for having me here.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you kindly.

Now we'll move to Dr. Patry.

[Dr. Gilles Patry, Executive Director, U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Let me start by saying how pleased I am to have been invited to speak to you today about the importance of science and research.

I am here as the executive director of the U15, an organization that brings together many of Canada's leading research universities.

The members of the U15, the Group of Canadian Research Universities, are responsible for 78% of the research, 81% of the patents and 70% of the PhDs in Canada.

Around the world, innovation-driven ecosystems are anchored by world-class research-intensive universities that are training tomorrow's leaders and innovators. Innovation is about people. Innovation is about making the world better. Innovation builds on basic curiosity-driven research to make things better for the benefit of society.

This pandemic has shown us the power of research, the need to persevere and the importance of innovation.

For many years, messenger RNA technology, which is the basis of the two most popular vaccines, was going nowhere.

The challenge was how to get the fragile strands of RNA through the cells. It was an almost insurmountable challenge, until a Canadian company from the University of British Columbia developed a lipid coating that forms a protective envelope around the RNA when it enters a cell. It's a Canadian university-based innovation resulting from years of fundamental research that is now used in one of the mRNA vaccines.

As we begin to emerge from the pandemic, Canada faces increasing competition for the talent needed to drive high growth, knowledge-intensive industries, address global challenges and build an equitable, inclusive society. Canada has many advantages in this competition, including a welcoming society, an open immigration system, vibrant cities, proximity to the U.S. and strong, world-class research universities.

Industry leaders will tell you that the crucial building block for success is having access to highly qualified people with advanced degrees, because they are tomorrow's generators of new knowledge and the drivers of innovation in companies and social enterprises across the country.

However, it should be noted that Canada ranks 28th in the OECD in terms of the number of master's and doctoral degrees.

When you invest in research, you invest in people—you invest in young people—and research investments made by successive governments over the past 20 years have certainly contributed to our quality of life. However, we need to be a lot more ambitious. Countries around the world are making massive investments in research and talent development at a scale never seen before. Canada will need to invest strategically in research, innovation and skills development, to ensure we continue to be economically competitive and able to equip Canadians for the jobs of the future, and remain a destination of choice for highly talented people from around the world.

In addition to the investments that are being considered right now, that is, the expansion of the CRC, the biomanufacturing investment, CARPA, commercialization investments etc., we need to make an important investment in the granting councils. When we look at inflation-adjusted research investments per Ph.D. over the last 20 years, it is very easy to demonstrate that Canada has a serious research funding deficit when compared to the period between 2002 and 2008. Now is the time to address this gap, to place Canada as a strong leader in science and technology and social science research.

In making these investments in research and innovation, governments need to consider two things. Number one is the need to be globally competitive. If we are to retain and attract the best minds in the world, it is important that our programs be globally competitive. Some of us have lived through the brain drain of the 1990s, and while we're not there yet, as we come out of the pandemic, the investments made by countries around the world are threatening our ability to attract and retain exceptional researchers.

The second thing is to remember that research, as I said, is about people. Research is about investing in the leaders and innovators of tomorrow in order to improve the lives of Canadians. It's also important to remember that close to 80% of the research funding goes directly to support students and post-docs.

Allow me to conclude by citing a paragraph from the 2014 Government of Canada budget plan.

To be successful in this highly competitive global economy, Canada needs to continue to educate, retain and attract the best minds in the world, to provide them with the space and facilities for innovation and creativity, to offer them the resources necessary to place Canada as a strong leader in science, technology and social science research.

Thank you very much. I'll be delighted to answer your questions.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you, Dr. Patry.

It's now time for our final presenter tonight, Dr. Goel, for five minutes.