Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to present to your committee.
I'm Jim Balsillie, presenting on behalf of the Council of Canadian Innovators.
As the committee is currently studying the successes, challenges and opportunities for science and research in Canada, it's important to evaluate both the inputs and the outputs of this ecosystem for Canada. Canada has spent tens of billions of dollars of public funds to build capacity in science and technology. These investments have propelled our universities to the top of global rankings for academic publications and the education of highly sought-after graduates.
Where Canada fails is in the commercialization of its ideas. We invest in science and research and developing ideas that have significant commercial potential, and then we either squander them or give them away. Simply put, Canada is missing critical capacity to turn its valuable ideas towards meaningfully advancing our prosperity and security.
Forty years ago, the traditional production-based economy began transitioning to a knowledge-based economy, and more recently to a data-driven economy. A world previously based on open, shared science and on liberalizing trade through tariff reductions and a patent system designed to reward genuine innovation has transitioned to a world of closed science, closed markets and monopolization of knowledge and information.
In recognition of the growing importance of IP, in 1980 the United States passed the Bayh-Dole Act, sweeping legislation that addresses the ownership of inventions that arise from publicly funded research. Canada continued to ignore the importance of generating IP. By 2016, even as the global share of the capital stock composed of intangible assets rose dramatically, the share of intangible assets in Canada's economy actually declined.
Repeated initiatives aimed at promoting economic growth either had no strategy for generating and commercializing IP or were designed to transfer decades' worth of publicly funded IP to foreign firms. Today, forty years after the advent of the knowledge-based economy, Canada's deficit in IP payments and receipts is widening at an alarming rate, a position we share with developing countries.
These outcomes have consequences for our prosperity, security and sovereignty, as indicated in a recent internal briefing to the Prime Minister. The OECD recently projected that Canada's economy will be “the worst performing advanced economy over 2020-2030” and the three decades after, affecting Canada's ability to pay for the goods and services we value.
To stop these naive and damaging outcomes, I propose three recommendations. One, re-establish the Economic Council. Canada needs the institutional capacity for the contemporary knowledge-based and data-driven economy. Two, create provisions for research agreements in line with what our Five Eyes partners have done. Properly delineate strategic technologies requiring oversight and regulation that are developed out of publicly funded research. Three, invest in IP collectives that can provide professional, centralized resources for the science and research community.
In conclusion, despite a highly educated population and public investments in R and D, Canada has consistently been a large net importer of IP. Canada's history of research and education excellence deserves better outcomes on commercialization opportunities where they exist. The path forward is not spending more or less money on R and D. Rather, it's about building the missing policy capacity for the contemporary economy, including how knowledge is generated, monopolized and commercialized.
Thank you.