Mr. Speaker, some time ago I raised with the Minister of Industry the subject of innovation and research and development in Canada. In particular I wanted to know why the minister and this government had not made research and development a priority. Why do they continue to let Canada fall behind the rest of the world in this area?
The Minister of Finance in his most recent budget stressed that our goal must be “to make Canada not just a participant in the modern economy, but a world leader”. That is right. The problem is that budgets have put Canada further and further behind. All experts agree that Canada suffers from a serious innovation in R and D gap.
President Clinton of the United States recently stated that sustained prosperity requires a continuous stream of technological innovation. That is quite right.
The minister might say that they have increased funding to the three granting councils that finance research and provide grants to students. Those three research agencies have seen their budgets restored in this last budget to 1994-95 levels. In other words, this last budget simply restored some of the cuts. By the year 2000-01, Canada's support for basic research and education for researchers will be no higher than it was six years earlier.
There are no new dollars, no new investment in R and D. That simply is not good enough. Others in Canada agree.
The president of NSERC, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council, recently said that more will have to be done in the coming years to build that capacity up to a competitive, world class economy. Even the Secretary of State for Research and Development has said the same thing. The president of Memorial University, just as an example, has said that Canada is acting like a third world country when it comes to R and D.
We are a vital trading nation. We need to get the message through to the government that we have to invest in the future. Other industrialized nations have listened and taken action. I mentioned President Clinton who has proposed future spending increases for institutes in the United States which are significant in comparison to ours.
The National Institutes of Research, the U.S. counterpart of the Medical Research Council, would see its funding rise by 50% by the year 2003, which is after steady increases through the 1990s, unlike in Canada. There is a 10% increase for the National Science Foundation, the U.S. equivalent of NSERC, building up to a 24% increase by the year 2003.
I could go on, but the point is that Canada is simply not in good shape when it comes to R and D and innovation. In fact while our funding has decreased, Australia, Germany and France have doubled their funding on basic research.
When the OECD studied this question, it called Canada a middle technology country along with other countries such as India, Greece and Mexico. Of the top 14 countries, only Italy's record on R and D spending is worse than Canada's.
This is not only embarrassing but it places Canada on a very dangerous path. Relying on other countries to do our basic research for us is simply not acceptable because it means that the information we get will be based on their priorities, not ours. The fact that Canada grossly underinvests in research and development is an important reason why the Canadian economy is left with more than 1.5 million people unemployed.
We know that Canada simply cannot continue in this way. We know that being competitive is the way in which we will make our way in the world. It is time this government and this minister recognized that and acted accordingly.