Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I would like to thank the committee for allowing me the opportunity to speak today and for the committee's service to the Canadian people. It's nice to see some of you again, including you, Madam Chair.
My name is Marc Nantel. As said, I'm the VP of research and external relations at Niagara College. I'm also the chair of the national research and advisory council of Colleges and Institutes Canada. I have experience in research at both university and college levels.
I got a Ph.D. in plasma physics in 1994. I then went to France and then to the University of Michigan, where I worked with Gérard Mourou, who was fortunate enough to have the Nobel Prize given to him with our friend Donna Strickland a couple of years ago. I then spent 10 years from 1998 to 2008 at the University of Toronto as an adjunct professor. I have been at the college since 2011.
I would like to talk quickly about some of the success I see from the funding program point of view. When I got my Ph.D. in 1994, research funding in Canada was at a low ebb, so I had to go away. However, when I saw in 1997 that the Government of Canada had created a Canada Foundation for Innovation, the CFI, and then the Canada research chairs, I knew it was time to come back, because Canada was getting serious again about research.
When I came back from Michigan, my first grant I received was from the CFI for the establishment of the University of Toronto's laser micromachining facility. The equipment is still in use today. I'm quite happy with that.
I consider these two programs to be great successes, the CFI and the CRC. They brought back Canadian scientists to Canada and recruited international stars. I think they are doing what they are supposed to do.
Another program that is dear to me is NSERC's college and community innovation program. Niagara College is one of the six colleges across Canada to help NSERC conduct this pilot for the program in 2006-09. The success of the pilot led to the continuing CCI program funding that NSERC runs for the tri-council. The annual budget is $85 million a year. This amount represents only about 2%-and-change of the total tri-council support for post-secondary research with the rest, 97%-plus, going to universities. Nonetheless, I consider this program to be a resounding success. Through NSERC's CCI program, the power of community colleges to contribute to research was unleashed, albeit only partially. We would need several times the current budget to fully realize it.
A challenge we hear a lot from the press these days, and for a while, has been that Canada does well at basic research and publishing results, but not so well at reaping the benefits of our intellectual property for Canadians. I don't purport to have solutions for how universities are going to tackle that, but let me tell you how colleges try to contribute.
College research complementary to universities is often about the application of knowledge to solve more immediate problems and about the companies, mostly SMEs, small and medium enterprises, that approach us for help. It's about developing new products, processes and services for them. It's about transferring these solutions and new commercializable results directly to industry, and it's about giving college students a richer education through these applied research projects so that they can be a better workforce.
Our timelines for these projects are, therefore, shorter. They're a few months to a year, as is the timeline for commercialization, because the IP is generally given straight up to the industry partner who can get on right away with commercializing it. It's more of a market pull situation than technology push.
The colleges are trying to help. All of the government and big science eventually needs to hit the ground. Often, at that point, colleges are involved in taking the concepts and prototypes that you make and bringing them to life with the companies that are going to put them on the market. Big science needs applied research to be successful in reaching its commercialization end goals.
College campuses are situated within 50 kilometres of 95% of the Canadian population and 86% of the indigenous population of Canada. We have 140 colleges across Canada, including more than 750 labs and research centres. In 2019 and 2020, they worked on more than 6,400 applied research projects, yielding more than 5,500 prototypes, processes, products and services, and 85% of these were realized within one year. Along the way, 42,000 students worked on the projects and got an enhanced education that allowed them to be innovative for the employer that will hire them.
Colleges work with SMEs, and the results and commercialization of the research leads these companies to be competitive on the market domestically and internationally, and to create jobs in all sectors of the economy. Because most of the companies with which we work are small and medium-sized enterprises and not multi-national corporations, the results directly benefit Canada.
At Niagara College, we focus, for example, our applied research on advanced manufacturing, agriculture and the environment, food and beverage and business and commercialization research. Other sectors covered by other colleges include ICT, health, energy and anything you'd like.
That's why I'd like to end my introductory remarks by asking that the committee consider the place that college-applied research could play in the overall research landscape in Canada and in the economic development, job creation and wealth generation that it can bring.
We can contribute so much more with better than 2% of the federal dollars going to all post-secondary research—