Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for this opportunity to be in front of this committee. It's quite a privilege. I hope that some day, I will get a chance to visit with the committee in person, as well.
I am speaking from the Treaty 6 territories and the homeland of the Métis, where we continue to advance our indigenous engagement with the communities in this province.
I also thank the committee for taking this very important question for discussion. At the University of Saskatchewan, we have been engaged in moving intellectual property or knowledge for the benefit of the end-users and in the service of prosperity of our province and the country.
Recently, there was an advisory panel that was struck by the honourable ministers of ISED and Health Canada, Minister Champagne and Minister Duclos, respectively. I had the privilege and honour of being a member of that seven-member panel. We were deeply engaged in the discussion on moving intellectual property to commercialization. That report was released yesterday, which the committee has already seen.
I'm going to speak in two parts. First, I want to share some examples of where we have been very successful in moving intellectual property to commercialization, and a couple of points that come to my mind as to how we can strengthen the system further.
The Province of Saskatchewan was created in 1905, and the university was established within two years of that to strengthen and grow the agri-food production system in the province of Saskatchewan. The university's College of Agriculture created a system called the “better farming train”, whereby the researchers from the university went to the farmers directly, where they were tilling their land, to provide the latest knowledge in agronomy, watering, crop science and harvesting technologies. That has led to what we have today, which is a multi-billion dollar agri-food enterprise in our province.
Within that period, the university created a crop development centre, which, from 1971 until today, has released more than 500 varieties of crops. If you figure it out in a timeline, that's one new variety every month or month and a half. It's no wonder that in western Canada we are a powerhouse when it comes to food production systems. This was a collaboration among the university, the producers and the federal and provincial governments' investment in the agri-food knowledge discovery system.
The second example, to really flesh out the point, is the collaboration that happened between multiple universities and led to the creation of a vaccine against a virus that affects pigs. However, before that, there was a step when discovery science came into play, which is so well funded by our tri-council in our country.
Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan discovered a virus, which led to the development of a vaccine in collaboration with Queen's University Belfast in Ireland and Ohio State University in the U.S. That vaccine technology was purchased by a company in France. Although we got more than $100 million in royalties to the university and the inventors, the job creation took place in France. We need to think about an ecosystem in this country that goes from end to end, in which we can take our intellectual property and develop the jobs in Canada.
There are two or three points that I want to make to advance our discussion. Number one is that we need to keep making investments in our federal research support system that we have in this country. I believe, based on the discussion we have had over the last year, that countries like the U.S., Germany, Norway, France, India and Brazil are moving ahead at a very fast pace when it comes to making investments.
Number two is that the ecosystem we need to create with the universities' creation of intellectual property can be strengthened in two ways. One is that a middle tier, where we go from technology readiness level 3 to level 7, needs to be somehow created so that small and medium economic enterprises can work with the university through a support system from the federal and provincial governments.
The other investment is in the training of researchers, graduate students and young researchers, so they can keep an eye on their inventions and know how to connect them to the private sector through commercialization pipelines that we can establish and support within our country.
Therefore, the training and retention of young minds and the strengthening of support for TRLs 3 to 7 are how we can connect that piece.
Mr. Chair, I will stop here, and I look forward to the discussion with the committee for the remainder of the time.
Thank you.