Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
It's a great pleasure to be with you, with all members of the committee, and with colleague witnesses, with whom we work all the time. Thanks for the invitation to participate in this important study and for the extraordinary work that all parliamentarians are doing in this very challenging time.
With me today is Ann Mainville-Neeson, our vice-president of policy and government relations.
Universities Canada represents 96 universities across the country. Taken together, Canada's universities are a $38-billion enterprise. Universities employ more than 300,000 people, and are often the largest employer in their communities.
During the pandemic, Canada's universities have delivered. They've delivered on their educational mission by enabling 1.4 million learners to move online within days, offering hybrid instruction and returning to in-person instruction as soon as it's safe. Enrolment is up, retention is up and completion is up. There's a generation of graduates ready to put their shoulder to the wheel for Canada.
Universities have delivered on their research mission. Decades of discovery research at Canadian universities, including the work of UBC's Pieter Cullis, have been instrumental in creating vaccines and saving lives. Universities have delivered, both as stabilizers for communities across Canada beset by disruption and as catalysts for social and economic renewal.
This new standing committee is an exciting opportunity for Canada to take stock of the state of research capabilities and to build a broad consensus about the value of research.
It's worth highlighting how these capabilities have been built over the decades with the support of parliamentary champions. I'm thinking tonight of Peter Adams, who served as the member of Parliament for Peterborough for over a decade. While never in cabinet, he was the key driver behind the major research investments in the late 1990s and early 2000s that Rob Annan just spoke of. James Rajotte, the former member for Edmonton—Leduc, was a tireless supporter of the research community through the years of the Harper government. Bloc and NDP members have also made valuable contributions over the decades. Of course, I'm also thinking of the work of this committee's chair, Ms. Duncan, and her continued advocacy, first in opposition and later in government.
My hope for this committee is that it will model best practice in the world for non-partisan, evidence-based championing of science and research. Canada has world-class universities, research facilities, and talent, but we face steep global competition. We need your help. With science and research on the front page for the last two years, our allies and competitors are seizing the moment to massively reinvest in their research ecosystem.
Germany has committed to grow R and D investment to 3.5% of GDP by 2025. The United Kingdom's target is 2.4% of GDP. Its recent foreign policy framework puts sustaining advantages in science and technology as the first of four elements in its vision for global leadership—not as an appendix or an afterthought, but as the first pillar. In the United States, the National Science Foundation for the Future Act, which proposes doubling the budget of the NSF, received the support of all Democrats in the House and 134 Republicans. Political parties in Finland have reached a bipartisan agreement to raise R and D spending to 4% of GDP by 2030.
Canada needs comparable ambition. Currently, we rank 18th out of 37 OECD countries on these measures, spending only 1.5% of GDP on R and D. Last fall the Senate's prosperity action group proposed a target of 2.5% of GDP by 2030, or about the OECD average. I hope we can do better than that, but the first step is setting a target. The window of opportunity for this is now. The fundamental science review was published five years ago, and the associated investments are flattening out. Canadian research talent from the graduate level and up, the backbone of our innovation economy, is at risk of being lured abroad.
We need to invest in a diverse range of research, including social sciences and humanities. As Vivek Goel, president of the University of Waterloo, recently noted, if the pandemic was simply a biomedical issue, the problem would have been solved a year ago.
Fundamentally, investing in research is about investing in people: the graduate students who are the backbone of our research ecosystem; early-career researchers performing novel and innovative groundbreaking research; ordinary Canadians whose lives are bettered by cutting-edge research; and the communities who prosper from the ideas developed and commercialized from Canadian universities.
To close, I want to reiterate our thanks to the committee for undertaking this study.
I want to strongly encourage the committee to visit local campuses and research facilities when it's possible again. It's a way to both feel decades younger and look decades into the future.
Thank you, again.