Mr. Speaker, I thank my whip for that. I will be splitting my time with the member for London—Fanshawe.
Laurentian exemplifies the duality of Canada, but, unfortunately, today it finds itself under creditor protection under the CCAA, the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act. I do not know the arrangements and circumstances under which that had to become a reality for it, but it is indeed sad. I understand that it will be axing 58 undergraduate programs. Of those, 34 are English language and 24 French are language. That decision is going to have a disproportionate negative effect on the Franco-Ontarian community. That is unacceptable.
I talked about French immersion being popular in elementary schools and high schools in British Columbia, but that does not necessarily translate into students then going on to French language universities. It is not true in British Columbia and I understand it is not true in Ontario. Therefore, the closure of this French language program represents a lost opportunity to promote French and a truly bilingual Canada.
Financial woes for universities across the country have become a reality, not just for this university but right across the nation, including a private university in my riding of Langley—Aldergrove, Trinity Western University. A lot of the financial challenges that universities face have come to light in the pandemic. We have discovered that universities rely very heavily on income from foreign students. Of course, with the closure of our borders and restrictions on temporary foreign students coming into the country, that has hurt a lot.
What the solution is I do not know. We are all optimistic that the pandemic will soon be over and maybe by next year, foreign students will come back in big numbers. Canada's universities are leading academic institutions and there will always be an attraction among foreign students to come to Canada.
Universities also rely on corporate partnerships. I am a Conservative and I applaud that. I applaud private initiative, which is a good thing, but it can lead to problems as well. A lot of our research chairs are funded by foreign corporations, which creates a real challenge if those foreign corporations are owned and controlled by foreign nations, especially if those nations are not particularly friendly to Canada.
I am thinking of companies like Huawei that have financed research chairs. They get the best and the brightest of Canadians to use their intellectual prowess to find new technologies and then the foreign nation takes the technology with it. It walks right out the front door. Canada needs to do something to protect intellectual property assets within Canada, to promote more research and development and to protect universities and corporations.
One idea that has been floated is patent collectives. Canada is a big country geographically, but small in number, so we need to band together to protect our intellectual property assets, our universities and keep our IP at home, working productively for our country and economy so we can export that. We should not be exporting our students or our intellectual property. We should be developing all of that at home and selling the finished product through patent licenses, for example.
The CanSino vaccine fiasco is a great example of where Canada is failing industrially. All Canadians thought that Canada was one of the leading countries in the industrialized world, so we were all very shocked to find out that we did not even have our own pharmaceutical industry. We cannot even develop our own vaccines to keep ourselves safe. We are lagging way behind other countries in vaccinating our citizens. Certainly, too, with the country that we like to compare ourselves to, the United States, which is right next door to us, we have fallen far behind. How did that happen?
There is a fundamental problem that Canada faces, and that is a lack of industrial willpower to do it on our own. Canadian universities have to be a central part of that.
That was a bit of a diversion away from the main topic of what is happening at Laurentian University. I understand it is not necessarily a research university, but the work that it is doing is very important. I would applaud any efforts that we could apply to keep this university sound and healthy.
It is not for the federal government to tell the province how it must build, promote and defend its universities and it is certainly not for me, a member of Parliament from the west coast, to tell Ontario what it must do or tell the university how it must survive and thrive.
I want the university community, the Franco-Ontario community and all Ontarians to know that we out here on the west coast have a great deal of emotional investment in what is going on in the country and in the university community. We stand behind them. Please make this happen. Make Laurentian University survive. We have their backs.