Thank you very much.
Chair, I intend to use my full five minutes, if that's possible. Don't hesitate to cut me off, of course.
I wish to thank the chair and the members of the committee for this opportunity. It's always an honour to speak to our House of Commons.
The topic of research security has gained in profile and significance in pace with the rise of the PRC to global status as a near peer to the United States in terms of national power. The reality that China is a potential adversary to Canada, combined with China's sharply different political system, requires that attention be paid to risks that may arise from the leakage of Canadian intellectual property and know-how from our leading post-secondary institutions and corporate research laboratories.
In May of this year, I presented to the Government of Alberta a comprehensive confidential report on academic research security, which they had commissioned and which took several months of research. The subject, as you know and as you've already heard this morning, is complex, as is often the case in international relations, and our G7 allies have also paid much closer attention to this issue as well.
However, a policy response requires careful examination and thought in order to avoid unintended consequences. In academic relationships with China, the emphasis should be on the protection but also the promotion of Canadian interests. These interests include advancing Canada's S and T prowess, while protecting and safeguarding our research accomplishments.
Now in my 37th year of full-time work on China as both a diplomat and an academic, I am wary of simplistic approaches towards a state as complex as China.
China now graduates roughly twice the number of university graduates as the United States, but approximately eight times as many STEM graduates—science, technology, engineering and mathematics. These numbers, projected over several years, have given the PRC a world-class research capacity, further bolstered by the network of private high-tech firms and state and corporate research laboratories. That advantage will grow.
Chinese universities and research labs are lavishly supported with state funds. We see the PRC's S and T development perhaps most dramatically in the Chinese space program, with a planned lunar base, a permanent earth-orbiting space station and Mars missions, but Chinese health research is also one of the factors behind the reality that China's life expectancy now exceeds that of the United States. Several decades ago, in Hong Kong, where I was serving in our mission, my son's use of his hand was restored after an injury by an application of the early PRC development of microsurgery techniques, which are now in broad international application.
The point is that we need to draw from China as much advanced knowledge as possible while minimizing risks associated with sensitive technologies that either involve security risks to Canada or are needed to protect our own accomplishments from theft. My premise is that cutting off all federal funding to co-operative research with China risks isolating Canadian researchers from key S and T developments within China to the detriment of our own research, particularly if we are not in alignment with our allies.
The tricky part is not whether we should fund projects in co-operation with Chinese researchers, but whether the co-operation is, in each case, in Canada's net interest. In my opinion, the Canadian government, led by ISED, has the capacity to lead on the evaluation of funding proposals with the involvement of CSIS, GAC, DND and other agencies and also taking outside advice from our own researchers and our allies as necessary.
What is urgently needed, I believe, is the development within ISED of a list of problematic PRC entities—and this may already be in process—such as the PLA-dominated national University of Science and Technology, where research collaboration carries clear risks. This list of problematic research should be paired with a list of problematic research topics that would exclude any shared research on those topics no matter the Chinese partner.
Our allies are doing this. When I called on the U.S. State Department in Washington in late 2022, I was told that the overarching U.S. government approach to scientific co-operation with China was to “promote and protect”: that is, to continue to promote academic research with the PRC, but to be vigilant in protecting U.S. research and researchers.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of medical research in the world, has not cut off funding of joint U.S.-China medical research. What they have done instead is implement controls on the nature of research and administrative measures to ensure that U.S. and PRC researchers comply with NIH regulations, because there have been cases where this has not been the case.
In Europe, Germany, France, the U.K. and the EU itself have not stopped research co-operation with China. They have, rather, proposed or implemented measures to reduce risks involving sensitive technologies that are key to either European security or the health of European research institutions and high-tech companies.
I commend to you the excellent—