Science and Research Committee on April 25th, 2023

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

In short, you would like to see more federal government support for non-profits, akin to what is given to businesses. Is that, in short, one of your main recommendations?

[Andrew Greer]

I think that's the main recommendation. It's to include social purpose organizations. There's tremendous value for Canadians.

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

Okay, thank you.

How much time do I have, Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

You have about two and a half minutes.

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

Okay. I'll turn to Mr. Francq and the Conference Board of Canada.

You obviously do a lot of measuring. You come up with report cards that deal with the performance of Canada and businesses and individuals in a lot of different categories.

We hear a lot about data in this committee. It sounds like you're going to expand your studies and your report cards quite dramatically. I'm just wondering where you're seeing a lack of data. Where is data hard to come by?

In my previous life, I often was trying to get data from different provinces as well as from Canada and the United States. It was difficult to find data sources that were usable, because they measured in different ways.

I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on where the federal government could step in and perhaps help organizations such as yours to get good data that we can base good decisions on.

[Alain Francq]

Thanks you very much.

That is indeed the question, especially for researchers, whether they be at the Conference Board or anywhere.

The short answer is.... For example, on our innovation report card, we do use secondary data. It's all the data that you mentioned. Some is from WIPO, from OECD, from the World Bank and from the IMF. We are collecting this data and we're using essentially proprietary models to cut, slice and dice it to try to get insights specifically for Canada. Then we do mixed methods, of course.

The reality is that we need co-operation as part of this. For example, the entire expert panel report that created IPON was a survey. It surveyed probably 50 organizations right across the entire innovation spectrum. We need engagement in that area.

Let me say this. Here's the answer. The government has an incredible wealth of data, and it is necessarily very confidential. For example, let's take SR and ED. You have an example of every single R and D project that has been approved in Canada. If you anonymize that completely and disaggregate it, you can provide insights in confidence to researchers to understand aggregately what's happening. That's one good example.

Another one, when we look—

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

I think we only have time for the one, but thank you. That was an excellent example.

We're going to move on to the second round.

I see Mr. Greer's hand up, but if you have any other comments, please submit them in writing. The members will direct the questions as they wish.

Mr. Lobb, you have five minutes, please.

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

Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.

My first question is to Mr. Francq.

The question is—I think you have this in one of your reports—on the idea that we have a large number of positions that go unfilled in this country. They may not necessarily be the highest of high tech positions, in the sense that you're sitting behind a computer and coding day after day; maybe you're operating a transport truck, or maybe you're operating an excavator or a high hoe or whatever it might be. It requires a degree of technical understanding, but also technology.

In your report that you mentioned, it's really embracing the ability to use software and some sort of artificial intelligence, if you want to use that well-used word these days. It's helping those companies that will fill the jobs that we really need in this economy.

Can you talk about that a bit?

[Alain Francq]

I certainly can. Thank you for the opportunity.

I'll start off by saying that the Conference Board is a founder of the Future Skills Centre. That is an over $200-million centre that's specifically looking at that problem.

Under this centre, we've conducted three research projects. What's nice about it is it's focusing on the clean economy, the blue oceans economy and the digital economy.

Even taking just blue oceans, for example, you're essentially looking at high-risk, low-mobility jobs. We call them HRLM. How do you move them into high-growth and high-demand jobs in, for example, cybersecurity and software?

You can't change a barista into a threat vulnerability assessment analyst, but there are pathways. You can look at the time, the cost and the different programs, including things like microcredentialing or certification in order to look at the skills gaps. When you look at skills gaps, they can be crossed with certain education and certain costs. When you look at where that is across the country, you can definitely see where the opportunities are across the clean and blue economies, and actually, last week, we released the digital economy occupational pathways.

That's one way to go about it.

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

The other question I wanted to ask you is.... We've had a few guests....

Are you done with your thought?

[Alain Francq]

No, I couldn't hear you. Go ahead.

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

Okay.

You've finished your thought, though, for what you were talking about before.

[Alain Francq]

Thank you.

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

The next question I wanted to ask you was.... We've had a few guests who have appeared and talked about not just the amount of investment in universities, which is important, but also on the return on that investment. It is a tremendous amount of money, and we're not always seeing the full return on that investment. What are your thoughts on that?

[Alain Francq]

Thank you.

As I mentioned, we did a research study for the Council of Ontario Universities, just in Ontario. It's actually quite substantial. We looked at the economic impact of universities on the regional economies. We looked at the activities and the human capital. In fact, we did direct, indirect and induced impacts.

I have a stat here from that report. The combined impact of university spending in Ontario is $96.2 billion, which is about 11.7% of the provincial GDP. That was in 2018 to 2019.

I have a comment on human capital—

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

I'm sorry. I'm going to interrupt you for a second.

I'm talking about the return on the investment of the research, not the spinoffs of all the other jobs. I'm talking about the actual return on investment for the technology.

[Alain Francq]

I see what you're saying.

Certainly, we still have the innovation paradox in play here. It is a problem when we have great ideas and great output, but it is not translated into the economy. That translation, or return on investment, is low. It is an Achilles heel right now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you.

It's over to Mr. Sousa for five minutes.

[Charles Sousa, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you very much.

To both of you gentlemen, I've appreciated your presentations and your deliberations. As you can appreciate, this committee was formed precisely because of the gap we saw in support of the commercialization of IP.

You've both done a good job of recognizing some of the strengths in the system and some of the shortcomings and what's required. Both of you have reiterated that what gets measured gets done and reiterated the importance of ensuring that we have the proper data to formulate resolutions to some of those shortcomings.

Mr. Francq, I want to go to you first. The Conference Board of Canada has a lot of accomplished individuals and business leaders who are looking at some of these situations in terms of strengthening Canada's economic well-being. You've posed challenges by way of your five recommendations—providing greater incentives, supports for innovation by way of funding some of those issues, prioritizing some of our IP rights and of course sharing data and then measuring what we do.

My question is this. I think all of us agree that more needs to be done in terms of protecting our sovereignty as a nation with regard to our innovation and then the commercialization of this innovation. What is the private sector doing to facilitate it? I mean, from what you've highlighted, many of your recommendations we are already doing to an extent, but what more can we do to ensure that the private sector takes some of the risk or is prepared to assume more risk?

[Alain Francq]

That is an intractable problem. A report by the Centre for Productivity and Prosperity concluded that the problem is actually a lack of internal competition in the country. That is part of it. I don't want to be glib and say that part of it could be that we're a bit complacent and lack the ambition. The Rideau Hall culture of innovation index, which is really more on the soft side of it, used a mixed methods approach to ask Canadians to rank who's responsible for fostering innovation. You could rank your top three or so. Half the people said it's the federal government, 45% said the universities, 36% said individuals and then start-ups, and 27% said business, so there is a culture here. I'm not so sure if.... It's a change management issue beyond a straight policy issue.

In summary, again, we have a lack of competition that is regulatory, and we do have a culture of innovation issue here as well.

[Charles Sousa, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Can you expand on that regulatory piece? What's the challenge?

[Alain Francq]

The short answer is that in examining why businesses are reluctant, they can't punch above their weight. They look at the space and perhaps even the freedom to operate. We recently did a study on independent towers for telecom, for example, choosing one area—to try to answer your question—and we found it was very difficult to compete on infrastructure-based competition. For example, when you go to Europe and other places where it's service-based, you can get much lower rates for service and of course 5G, which is the basis of the innovation economy. We can see regulatory barriers to innovation in the country.

[Charles Sousa, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Greer, in terms of the social impact, are social entrepreneurs facing the same kind of burden?

[Andrew Greer]

Yes. To your previous question, ISED did a study a few years ago and really pointed out the data that we all feel, that Canada is good at start-ups and bad at scale-ups. If we're going to expect businesses and SPOs to invest in intellectual property and commercialization, we need to get them past the start-up stage. We need to get them into profitability and focus on profitability, and not necessarily focus on intellectual property or investment. Get them to profitability.

[Charles Sousa, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

If I may, whose responsibility is it for the profitability? I mean, you don't want government adjudicating on deals. You want to make certain there is a collaboration between all the sectors. How do we facilitate or encourage some of those incentives for those private investors to take it on? That's why we see so much of other jurisdictions around the world buying up our IP.