Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to discuss the fifth report of the Standing Committee on Finance. I am sharing my time with the hon. member for York-Simcoe.
I know a lot about the finance committee. I served on the finance committee. I congratulate the committee for its work and its very fine report. I know the long hours which that committee sits and the many witnesses it hears in dealing with this country's economic problems.
The report talks of a broad range of generalities. It talks about our existing trade surplus. This of course is one of the things which has driven our economy to success. Within the trade surplus is the fact that we are continuing with our historical trading patterns. A lot of it is oriented toward automobile trade and the natural resource sector.
One very important aspect the report talks about is the need for more money in research and development. That is something which interests me. It is the underpinning of our economy.
When we talk about jobs and growth, it is appropriate to think not about what is going to happen tomorrow, but rather where we would like the economy to be in the year 2010. If we thought of ourselves in the year 2010 and looked back to today, we would ask ourselves what sort of structures we would put into place to make Canada a competitive economic engine in the world marketplace.
I congratulate the finance committee for noting the very important aspect of research and development. Canada is rated in the OECD countries as about 18th in the world in the area of research and development spending. That is not good enough. Through our budgetary constraints we have cut spending in research and development over the last two or three years by $91 million. For Canada to catch up to the world we have to put more energy into our research and development budgets. We have to do that effectively and efficiently. We cannot afford to waste our valuable resources as we build a new innovative economy.
The Asian countries are going leaps and bounds ahead of us in a lot of ways in this area. As a matter of fact, I just had the advantage of coming back from Taiwan where I was invited by the local chamber of commerce there to look at its economy. It is an amazing success story; from 1948 with a population of 5 million, the size of Vancouver Island, to today with 21 million and the eighth largest economy in the world. It did it with education, research and technology.
We have a great country here. It is a huge country full of natural resources but I do not think we are using our best natural resources, the resources between our ears. That is why I was very pleased to see that the finance committee noted the importance of increasing our commitment to research and development.
In 1993 we had an infrastructure spending program. That was very important for the economy and the mood of the people which existed back in 1993. The object of that program was to provide hope. I think that has done that. Most people in this country realize this is a different world and a different economy than we had in 1993.
That infrastructure spending program focused a lot on municipal infrastructure, roads, sewers, and so on. Everybody realized with the differences in our economic well-being that we are not going to be able to put as much money in the infrastructure spending program as possibly we once did. Having said that there is the other important aspect and that is to refocus that program.
I mentioned the infrastructure of the grey matter between our ears. I noted one of the very important points in that report was increasing funding for infrastructure through science and technology. I believe that is really where the growth in employment in this country is going to be.
Statistics Canada has told us over and over again that those companies which use science and technology in their operations expand quicker and have a higher payroll, that wages are higher in those industries.
We very much live in a time of a changing economy where the old economy is getting smaller and the newer economy, which is the knowledge based economy, is growing. We have to make sure
that we spend our resources on the right side of that equation. I believe the right side of that equation is in science and technology.
Speaking of technology, how do we physically do this? We have already established the NSERC program and also the national centres of excellence. These centres link all our university research programs together so that we do not have duplication going on in two or three institutions at the same time. They communicate with one another and they focus on how to develop new technologies.
It is through this type of system that I believe we should be underpinning our new infrastructure spending program. In my riding I have one of those schools of excellence at Durham College. I know it is looking forward to finding ways to enter and excel in the area of science and technology but it needs the resources to do that. This is where governments come in.
Some people will ask why governments are involved in research and technology and should not private industry do that. In every OECD country their governments are heavily proactive in the area of financing science and technology. Why is that? Industry invariably has short term goals, profit maximization. Indeed a lot of the people I have talked to talk about how much their profits or losses are going to be in the next three months. They do not even talk about next year anymore. Their focus is very much short term.
This is where governments can bring in that long term planning and thought horizon which will deliver us and our country into the year 2010 with a robust and engineered society. We are underpinning the importance of science and technology.
In our high schools and post-secondary institutions we have to spend more time focusing on where we are going as a country economically. I have been surprised by the number of secondary schools I have gone to. When I talk to the students they are unaware of how our economy is changing. I think it is important for government to show leadership in this area, to tell our youth this is how the economy is changing and that they very much have to be part of that.
It is very important that we do not just have a hollow comment about the importance of this new economy but that we participate in the funding of that science and technology to increase the knowledge base that exists in this country.
Canada has a tremendous background of success in science and technology, in telecommunications sectors, bio-medical research and agriculture research and engineering. These are all areas where Canada has excelled in the past. We have a nucleus for that which exists in our country and we have that within our university environments.
One thing that is important that I believe any new spending program on research and development should underpin is a filtration system. By that I mean every project that a centre of excellence or NSERC looks at should have a filtering system where they actually filter out whether a concept is a marketable concept. It talks about the commercialization of basic research.
These are the things this budget summation is all about. It is looking toward the future, not the past, putting useful and meaningful employment in the hands of our young people, looking to the year 2010 where Canada can be the leader in the world in science and technology.