Science and Research Committee on March 1st, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Ms. Gagné, I'm sorry to cut you off, but we're out of time. Thank you.

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

Madam Chair, could we ask Ms. Gagné to provide an answer to this question in writing? It could then be sent to committee members.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Absolutely.

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

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you, Monsieur Blanchette-Joncas.

Now we will go to Mr. Cannings for six minutes.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to thank the witnesses again.

I'm going to start with Dr. Murphy. It's nice to have someone from UBC here, my alma mater. It's not only that, but also that I worked there for 17 years in the department of zoology. I have a lot of fond memories of that, but it was a long time ago so things have changed, I'm sure.

You seem to be an ideal person to ask about innovation, the fundamental research piece and then the innovation that can and should follow on from that in many cases.

My friend Pieter Cullis has been in the news with regard to the mRNA vaccines and the basic research he did. I don't know if the innovation for the vaccines was developed there or if any development like that happened, but I'm wondering how much of that kind of innovation goes on at UBC now, or at any big university. How important it is to the university and the researchers?

[Dr. Gail Murphy]

A lot of this kind of research goes on, and thank you for mentioning Dr. Cullis' work. He developed the lipid nanoparticle coding for the mRNA vaccines. Dr. Cullis would be the first one to tell you that it is built on 40 years of research funded by the Government of Canada. It was fundamental basic research when it began and over the years, as they started to see different kinds of applications, it became somewhat more applied and then moved out into an industry start-up to further develop it.

That's one story that's similar to many stories at UBC which have gone from basic research within the lab to actually changing the course of a particular industry sector. Another example would be Carl Hansen's work on antibodies for various different kinds of diseases, including SARS-CoV-2, and he has taken that out in a start-up that is now a billion-dollar company named AbCellera.

I could go on and on with those stories. What is important with them is they started from curiosity-based, investigator-led research that was fundamental. No one saw those particular uses when these individuals were trying out things that people had never thought about doing, then through many years, they were able to take it forward and started to work with different types of partners to investigate how things could be applied.

One of the hard things to understand about the research landscape is that we need that whole spectrum. It's an ecosystem approach to really get through to the innovation capabilities, and that's not only at the universities. It's our college partners, who are producing talented individuals who can help run the manufacturing plants or do the biomanufacturing, etc. It's our people in art and design colleges who can help interpret descriptions of research results to provide to families with autistic children.

What we have to look at is the entire ecosystem that helps feed into innovation, and recognize that we need to fund different parts of this overall ecosystem and pipeline.

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

You really emphasized how important it is to support students in all of this. You mentioned that scholarship and bursary funding has been stagnant for 20 years. I've heard that from student groups I have met with.

Does it seem to you that perhaps we've forgotten that really basic foundation of science and have been distracted by the shiny new things that are happening at the other end of the spectrum? How important is it to get those scholarships and bursaries up so that students stay in Canada? I've talked to students who have gone to the United States because that's where they can get scholarships that they can live on.

[Dr. Gail Murphy]

I will speak to this question partly from having been a federal government-funded student who went to the U.S. to do my Ph.D. and came back. I was also a federally funded undergraduate student in research who, first of all, went to industry before going back to graduate school.

What's important is really enabling our youth to follow those questions they might have thought about when they were younger. They suddenly get into an institution where they have an opportunity to follow some of those questions. It's not that they will necessarily become the Nobel laureate, but they will become individuals who think about problems critically, who have an opportunity to understand how to take various sources of information, trade them off against each other and understand what might be actual reality in the information they're being presented with. They will be able to really take that forward to industry, to not-for-profit and into government service and use that questioning mind they've developed through these research projects to help further our entire society.

I think it all starts at the beginning. Dr. Quirion mentioned going into primary schools. That kind of funding of outreach to schools, our science facilities and our museums are always to ignite in our youth, who are our future of Canada, that opportunity to know that they can learn new things that they can take into actually changing the course of how people live and work.

I think we have lost sight of the need to start that pipeline and fund our students.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you so much, Mr. Cannings, and thank you to all our witnesses.

Now we're going to go into our second round. These are for five minutes. We're going to start with our new member. We welcome you, Ms. Gladu.

You have five minutes, please.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here.

Since it is my first time, I must say what an honour it is to be here and to be continuing the work we began when I was first elected. I worked with the chair and I was the critic for science. We were trying to determine what to do to help science in Canada. We wanted to see where Canada could lead and how we could maintain that position. We wanted to see where we needed to maintain research and science so we could support our GDP and where we really needed to partner globally in order to afford to be able to do some of the open science and larger research. Then we wanted to identify some of the barriers that we've talked about tonight in terms of resources, like the brain drain and trying to get more women into science, engineering and math.

My first question is for Dr. Murphy.

You talked about research and the difficulty with commercialization. I do see that a lot of the research we do in Canada ends up, at the end of the day, being commercialized in another country. What are the barriers? What things should we be doing to try to keep the research that's happening turning into commercialization here in Canada?

[Dr. Gail Murphy]

Thank you for that question.

One of the important things to do is to make sure all of our researchers have access to knowledge about what intellectual property is. It's not just patents. It can be trade secrets. It can be other forms. Sometimes individuals don't know how they might actually take forward some of the ideas they have that could actually find their way into commercialization streams. There's a big part to education.

There's also a need to ensure that we're connecting the right people within our communities and educating the broad spectrum of people needed to take something from being an idea into being a product.

One place where things perhaps fall apart a little bit in Canada is that innovation gap that is often spoken about. If you're developing a new chemical process, this might be the funding to do something at scale, but not at production scale. It's taking it from what happens at a lab bench into something a little bit bigger in some sort of plant where you might be able to try something more at scale.

There are a number of places where we could fund different kinds of infrastructure to help in that translation. We could also fund the kinds of people you need to develop skills that are not just the research side of the skills, but the skills for seeing what the product could be out of that research, doing the product fit, building out the marketing and expertise in terms of running a company.

It's difficult to put all the pieces together within the ecosystem. We're seeing various organizations, like the Creative Destruction Lab, help in that kind of translation by having mentors available for young project teams to understand what that transition might look like.

There are various items within the ecosystem that we might be able to fund to help more of our research ideas find their way into commercialization.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

That's very good. Thank you.

For Ms. Gagné, I'm very impressed with the 59 different CCTTs. I went online and looked at all of them. I know NSERC was trying to create something similar. You mentioned the CATs.

What are the things that are keeping us from achieving the success that you've had, and how could we accelerate the success that you've had?

[Marie Gagné]

You need to understand that, in Quebec, the CCTT system is extremely structured, organized, complementary, dynamic and collaborative. I think that the same thing needs to be done across Canada, so that it's not just a Quebec network but a Canadian network where technology access centres, CCTTs and the university sector would all be interconnected.

Ms. Murphy spoke about commercialization. If we want to further commercialize innovations and improve commercialization, the link between basic research and more applied research is extremely important. We also need to find ways of making the entire ecosystem more fluid and funding projects that are outside the framework of regular programs. Projects are increasingly complex and multidisciplinary. It is important to encourage collaboration between the various research stakeholders. Of course, the crux of the issue is money, so this research needs to be funded.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you very much.

For Dr. Quirion—

Are we out of time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Ms. Gladu, I'm sorry, and it's your first time, too.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

I always have more questions than I have time for.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

We're glad you've joined us.

We will go now, for five minutes, to Mr. McKinnon, please.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Sorry, it's my turn.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Oh, sorry. We're going to Ms. Diab, for five minutes, please.

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to ask questions.

Thank you so much to all the witnesses who are with us today.

Mr. Quirion, I have a question for you.

As you know, our committee has already heard from the chief science advisor of Canada, Mona Nemer. You say that you have an excellent relationship with her.

What are the differences between your role and hers?

How do you work together? Do you share information?

[Dr. Rémi Quirion]

We share many secrets, but I can't talk about all that this evening.

Seriously though, we have a great relationship.

Concerning the differences between the two roles, I personally am an adviser to the Quebec government on research and innovation, and I also chair the Quebec funding agencies, so the Québec Research Funds. It's somewhat equivalent to the three federal funding agencies. We have roughly the same three agencies in Quebec. We are complementary. In Quebec, we support students a lot through scholarships and we have a lot of strategic clusters like networks. Ms. Nemer does not have that mandate, which I think is a bit unfortunate. When someone has not only a mandate as a government adviser, but also a more active role in research programming, it helps put into action some of the ideas that the individual might have or the suggestions that they receive from the research community, the private sector or government. In that respect, there is a difference between the two roles.

During the pandemic, we worked together closely. As I said earlier, we didn't really know what was possible, before this infamous pandemic. Much work is done internally, in the Quebec government, but I also work with Ms. Nemer, with colleagues from the funding agencies and with the Public Health Agency of Canada.

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thank you very much.

Dr. Murphy, this question was asked, but I'd like to ask it again of you. As a woman on this science and research committee and as somebody who is trying to understand a bit more and really would like to see a lot more females involved in science and research, I think it's tough enough for boys to be in that, let alone females or diverse representation, and so on.

I come from Nova Scotia. We've just reached a population of one million. I have 10 universities in Nova Scotia and a Nova Scotia community college that has 14 campuses, so we're very rich in education.

From your experience, given the fact that you said you're the second largest university in Canada, what I'd like to know from you is, what else can you offer us? How can we get more females or more diverse people involved in research and in science?