Mr. Speaker, I stand to speak in favour of this motion and to speak with a great deal of anxiety for the future of Canada.
Canada is a small country with only 32 million people. If we are to not only survive but thrive in this world of global competitiveness and become productive competitively, to keep our jobs, to create new jobs and to stop the great brains from leaving Canada, we need to be smart. We are not a populous nation like China, India, the United States or the European Bloc. However, even though we may not have the quantity of workers, we can develop the quality of workers.
Canada's future lies in two important things. We need to invest in human capital. We not only need to have the best, the brightest, the most skilled and the most innovative and creative workers of the world but we also need to invest in important long term jobs in which Canada can play a big role in developing niche markets.
Canada has shown itself to be very good and particularly clever at things like environmental technologies, biomedical technologies, communications technologies and space technologies. Canada is a leader in all of these areas. The problem is that Canada is losing ground. If we are to compete in this global economy, Canada needs to be smart. Other nations of the world have figured this out. If we look at the United States, President Obama, in his stimulus package, spent six times more per capita than Canada spent on that technological knowledge based economy. We are falling behind the United States.
One can argue that the United States is a big country with over 350 million people so maybe we should look at the little countries. Let us look at Japan. Japan is actually spending about 3.4% of its gross domestic product on research and development and technology and innovation.
Finland is little country. We all know about Nokia phones. We all know that Finland is a leader in communications technology. Finland is spending 3.9% of its gross domestic product.
Sweden, which is leading the world in terms of automotive technologies and other technologies, is spending about 3.9% of its GDP.
When we compare Canada to those little countries, Canada is spending 1.9% of its gross domestic product on this.
I do not believe that the government gets the importance of research and development, not just commercial research and development, but basic research and development. It is basic research and development that, way back, put Canada in the driver's seat in creating insulin, in finding a treatment for diabetes with Banting and Best. We have followed through, more recently, with people like the Nobel Prize winner at UBC, Michael Smith, who found ways of creating new insulin substitutes using basic chemical science. It was Michael Smith that came to our government, the Liberal government, in 1993 when we were sitting around wondering why all of the great brains were leaving. We talked about the great brain drain. Everyone was concerned that people were going to the United States, Japan and Europe. People were going everywhere but staying here. We were losing some of our finest minds. We decided, together with people like Michael Smith, that we would invest in research and development, not only commercial research and development, but basic research and development in the niche areas where we felt that we already had established ourselves as leaders in the world.
In fact, in 1997, when we started the spending, we were number six in the G7 countries in terms of government spending on research and development. By 2003, Canada was number one in the G7 in research and development.
What we need is a vision to understand that we are talking about the sustainable jobs for tomorrow. We are going into the 21st century and we need to become a 21st century nation. We cannot compete with China in making cheaper T-shirts. We cannot compete with Mexico in making better and cheaper car doors in the automotive industry. We need to look at what we did earlier on in the 1990s when we created fuel cell technology for the automotive industry with Ballard Power Systems in British Columbia.
RADARSAT-2 is Canadian technology that came out of a partnership with MacDonald Dettwiler in Richmond. It is the only piece of technology that can focus in on a little street in a little town.
Out of that technology came Cassiopeia where we can upload and download enormous amounts of information. No other country has been able to do that. We have been doing it because of research and development.
The biggest investment was with Genome Canada when we brought back a young Simon Fraser University graduate named Dr. Marco Marra who was at Johns Hopkins. He was the foremost mouse imprinter in genomics in the world. He came back to head up genomics with a lot of people who admired his work and were working with him in the United States. With this investment, we shifted from a brain drain to a brain gain.
Those are the kinds of things that our Liberal government was talking about in the 1990s and early 2000 when we looked at doubling and tripling the budget. We put $12 billion into research and development. We saw the brain drain end and the brain gain occur. Canada was taking its place in the world. We saw RIM. We saw fuel cell technology.
Canada is an international leader in communication technology with RIM. Everybody has a Blackberry. Members may remember when everybody was worried that the Blackberry era would end because RIM was involved in a big court case. The U.S. Congress was concerned that it would have to shut down. This is the kind of stuff we are talking about.
We just heard some members talking about the recent Canadian Arctic environmental and atmospheric studies that are going on. Twenty-four research facilities depend on the work being done there in terms of climate change and atmospheric change. That work is no longer being funded and it will die in 2010, taking 24 facilities with it. The world has been looking to us as a leader in that kind of environmental technology but we are letting the world down.
Let us look at space technology. Canada is building something called the Thirty Metre Telescope and the world is waiting for it. The U.S. and Europe want to build a similar telescope and they want Canada to build it for them. Members can just imagine what that would mean to Canada as a leader in the world in astronomy.
People are waiting to get the okay from Canada and they need $170 million from the government over five years but they cannot get an answer from the government. The people are waiting to hear back. The Canadian team is hiding its head in embarrassment because it does not know what to do. If the Canadian team does not get to build that telescope and the government does not put that money forward as a key partner, China and India are waiting in the wings with their hands held out saying that they will do it.
Not only will we need to compete with China for T-shirts, but we will need to compete with it in research and development and technology, as will with India. Think of the number of people who will be working in those industries. We need to be smart but we are not being smart.
Does the government not get it? Does it understand basic research? Does it understand applied research? When the government talks about shovel-ready jobs, does it realize it needs to think about welding-ready jobs like the telescope I talked about?
The government cut $148 million from the key granting bodies and $27.8 million from NRC. No wonder people in the Canadian Medical Association are saying that we think about shovels instead of test tubes.
Do members know that the HIV-AIDS treatment came out of Genome Canada, that the newest asthma treatment came out of Canada, that the sequencing of the SARS virus in 24 hours came out of Canada, that the fundamental puzzles of biology, such as the T-cell receptor, that will help us cure diseases in the future, came out of Canada?
We are dumbing down this country. Canadian jobs will suffer and our place in the world will suffer. Let us turn that clock back to where we have been going and bring ourselves back up instead of pulling ourselves down.