Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to thank the committee for undertaking this study and for inviting me as a witness.
As said, my name is Marc Nantel and I'm the vice-president of research, innovation and strategic enterprises at Niagara College. I have experience in research at both the university and college levels. I have a Ph.D. in plasma physics, have done research in France and in the U.S. and was an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Toronto for 10 years. I've been at Niagara College since 2011, leading its research and innovation division.
You will no doubt hear much about university research and the distribution of funding between smaller and larger universities for this study. I'm here to discuss the place of colleges within that ecosystem. Interestingly, 11 colleges get more overall research funding than the university listed at number 50 on the Canadian university research list, so several colleges do more funded research than some universities.
College research is often about the application of knowledge to solve immediate problems. It's about the companies that approach us for help. It's about developing new products, processes and services with them. It's about giving college students a richer education.
At Niagara College, we've been doing applied research with industry for more than 25 years. We are currently number one on the top-50 research college list. We focus our applied research on sectors of importance to the Niagara region, such as advanced manufacturing, agriculture and the environment; food and beverages; and business and commercialization. Typically, we require that there be a one-to-one matching of government investment in a project so that the company has skin in the game and the desire to commercialize the result, which leads to faster economic development and job creation.
Here's only one example. I can give more during the question period.
Hamill Machine is a Niagara Falls small to medium-sized enterprise that used to cater to the automotive parts industry. Niagara College helped Hamill develop a completely new product line that automates the harvesting of microgreens, speeding it up by 50 times. Their three harvester machines for cutting, washing and drying are now sold domestically and internationally under a new spinoff company, Hamill Agricultural Processing Solutions, which has grown over the past five years from zero to 20 full-time employees. Last year, it did $3 million in sales and completed its first overseas installation in Abu Dhabi.
That's great, but Canadian colleges achieve outcomes like this for the country on less than a shoestring. I like to say that we do it on the plastic bit at the end of the shoestring. Right now, colleges receive only 2.9% of the federal funding for research.
Here's an example of how colleges lead and could do more with better funding.
Niagara College is the creator and leader of the Southern Ontario Network for Advanced Manufacturing Innovation, or SONAMI. You heard about it from Madam Johnston earlier. It brings together nine colleges and two universities. We like collaborating.
In its eight years of existence so far, SONAMI has undertaken more than 460 projects with 316 industry partners that commercialized 149 products. That's a 32% commercialization rate. It has created more than 280 jobs. Those are undercounts because of reporting. These projects were mostly funded through FedDev Ontario and also through NSERC.
This is an example of how colleges can lead strong networks that include universities, but currently, several federal funding programs supporting similar networks do not allow colleges as lead applicants. This needs to change, as do the measurements of success of such programs, which should reflect what colleges can bring to the table. If the evaluation criteria are about refereed papers instead of the number of jobs created, then college applications won't rank very well. That would be both disappointing and counterproductive if what you want is economic development through manufacturing transformation, transition to a greener economy, industry investment in technologies and increased productivity.
Here's another example of what colleges could do with more than 2.9% of the federal research funding. We don't keep the intellectual property generated through these collaborative projects generally. We give it to the industry partner. Companies come to us for solutions, but they don't always know what to do and how to get the best benefit for the IP. Colleges could help them understand what they have and help them commercialize it. Right now, though, colleges and their offices of research are underfunded and do not have the bandwidth or resources to take their industry partners on this complex journey.
In conclusion, I'm happy that colleges are included in this study. I hope that I have demonstrated the important role that they can play in Canada's research ecosystem, especially as it touches industry relevance, economic development and job creation. We can do so much more if we can be recognized as such and enabled to realize our full potential for Canada's economy of the future.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.