Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Motion No. 38, which proposes to split the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology in two after the next election. The Bloc Québécois welcomes this proposal. We need to recognize that the current committee's mandate is very broad, perhaps too broad, and that its responsibilities are numerous and disparate. The innovation, science and economic development portfolio for which the committee is responsible includes 17 federal departments and agencies, and it is responsible for the administration of 36 acts and a large number of regulations.
Creating a committee devoted exclusively to the subject would therefore ensure that science and research are given all the attention they deserve, in order to develop a truly comprehensive vision, which is sorely lacking at this time. In addition, it goes without saying that political decisions must be made based on evidence and critical analysis. That is precisely what is known as the power of science.
One need only recall the Stephen Harper government, under which government scientists were muzzled and ignored, especially on environmental and climate change issues. To this day, certain analyses by government researchers remain unavailable, including the Department of Industry's economic analyses of net benefit under the Investment Canada Act.
This new science committee would also free up the industry committee to focus on other issues that deserve more time and consideration than it is currently able to offer. I am thinking about support for SMEs and regional development, which are issues that are truly very important to the Bloc Québécois.
As we gradually emerge from the health crisis, fingers crossed, it is urgent and essential that we focus on the economic recovery, which must be green and based on innovation. This should be a priority file for the industry committee, whose work on the economic aspects of this recovery has not yet started and therefore could not be considered during the drafting of the 2021-22 budget, even though it was touted as the recovery budget.
Once it is freed from some of its current responsibilities, the industry committee could also study one blatant injustice toward Quebec and hopefully address it too. The government cannot claim to want a recovery based on innovation without acknowledging that Quebec accounts for roughly 40% of Canada's research and development intensive exports. Meanwhile, Canada has some of the lowest levels of research and development activity in the OECD.
Quebec is a leader and a trailblazer in artificial intelligence, information technology and transportation electrification, which are all fields of the future. The same goes for aerospace, of course, which is very important to me and which I often talk about in the House, as I am the critic for this file. Quebec is the third-largest aerospace hub in the world, after Toulouse and Seattle.
However, of the 100 National Research Council of Canada research centres, 50 are in Ontario compared to only nine in Quebec. This means that Quebec accounts for 40% of Canada's technology exports but only 9% of the federal research centres.
This does not add up. This lopsided distribution demonstrates that our strengths and ingenuity are being sidelined in favour of a federal strategy whose main purpose is to let Canada play catch-up, rather than allow Quebec to expand as it could if it had full decision-making power, as a nation should.
Despite the undeniable advantages of the changes proposed by Motion No. 38, we must ensure that the creation of two separate committees does not separate science from issues related to industry and innovation. It is good to have a new structure that will make it possible to conduct more in-depth studies on specific issues, but that does not mean that we should now say that science is not equal to industry, since there is a very fundamental connection between these two areas. The whole issue of developing COVID-19 vaccines showed us how basic research, applied research and bringing an innovation to market are all links in the same chain.
That is why the Bloc Québécois is proposing a change to the motion, and we hope that the mover of the motion is open to the idea.
We are proposing the creation of a subcommittee on science and research that would study the scientific aspects and then report to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology. That would make it possible to obtain much the same benefits while avoiding the risk of negative effects.