Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, members of the committee. I would like to thank you for having me today. It's good to be back.
I would like to start off by stating that Ontario Tech is a STEM-based institution with approximately 12,000 students. We're located in Oshawa and proud to be in the Durham region.
We do not strive to be a comprehensive university; we know our strengths, energy and engineering, and we focus on them. I'd like to focus my comments today on how Canada can address two major problems related to research.
First, Canada has a productivity problem. We are less productive per capita every year and have fallen behind our traditional global peers. As we know, at the heart of the productivity problem, although the Government of Canada invested $3.42 billion in research in 2021-22, compared to our global peers, Canada has fallen way behind. In 2021, Canada invested just 1.7% of GDP on R and D compared to the U.S. at 3.5%, Japan at 3.3%, Germany at 3.1% and the list goes on.
Academic research and development are major drivers of Canadian innovation and economic growth. Universities conduct more than 40% of Canada's total R and D, producing over $55 billion annually in economic activity and supporting 680,000 direct and indirect jobs in communities of all sizes, including the Durham region. When it comes to research funding, however, Canada is falling well behind our peers, that have made significant new investments to support advanced research training.
At Ontario Tech, we are recognized internationally for our research strength, and our impressive reputational trajectory continues upwards with a fresh distinction as Canada's research university of the year in 2023. In fact, Research Infosource recently reported its five-year university spotlight highlighting a key number of research areas of growth, which I think are germane to our conversation today.
We're ranked number one in Canada in cross-sector collaboration publications percentage growth. That talks about the importance of collaboration in research. We're ranked number two in Canada in corporate research income percentage growth, which means that we are working with corporate entities to solve practical, real-world problems. We're ranked number two in Canada in international collaboration publications percentage growth, which means we're solving research dilemmas that face the globe.
With total university research income now surpassing $23 million annually and growing by about 8% every year, Ontario Tech boasts strong growth in not-for-profit research income, international government research income and international collaboration. A recent international survey ranked us as a top-three engineering school, and we're extremely proud of that. We're leaders in R and D.
The R and D problem is that we have not seen productivity growth in an awfully long time, and, over the past four decades, we have slipped significantly compared to other countries. The Bank of Canada argues that three elements contribute to stronger productivity: capital intensity, labour composition and multifactor productivity. All three of these point to the importance of the job market and being highly trained in fields like AI that will change the productivity needle.
Ontario Tech is well positioned to respond to this labour market demand. It's through the programs in computer science, engineering, business and IT, business analytics and artificial intelligence, where we have really well-established research programs, that we're going to be able to graduate our labour needs to counter the productivity problems. You need to have that cutting-edge research and those ideas that take shape in our students' minds and blossom as they enter the workforce.
The number and dollar amount of Canadian graduate scholarships, as we know, has not kept pace with inflation or the growing graduate student population. It is estimated that, each year, thousands of recent Ph.D.s leave Canada to pursue careers abroad, representing an annual loss of $740 million to the country. This poses a serious problem for our future and our growth.
We urge the committee to focus on ways the government can ensure that sufficient funds are available to all universities and accessible to researchers at institutions of all sizes that submit successful research grant applications.
We're a glowing example of an institution that is only 20 years old but has to go up against the U15 and others with established records. We're really proud of the Canada research chairs we have and the trajectory that we are gaining, but we are definitely swimming against the current.
Every university has its competitive niche. At Ontario Tech, all things energy, engineering and STEM more broadly are our areas. In fact, roughly 60% of our programs are in STEM fields, which exceeds the provincial average by over 20%.