Health committee  Absolutely. I know MaRS very well and have a number of colleagues who have worked with it. It's a model, as I think Dr. Weaver said, but it's not the only model. In the United States, as you mentioned, they tend to do things very differently. The Stanford Research Institute was several hundred acres of bare, barren land next to Stanford.

Health committee  Yes, thank you. That is true. I believe there are two reasons our technologies go abroad. One reason, as I mentioned, is the lack of venture capital. The government does not provide much of that money, so I don't believe the particular cutbacks you are referring to will affect that.

Health committee  I think Health Canada is pretty good. They too have problems with evaluative capacity, just like business. For example, the MRI guidelines in Canada have not been updated since the mid-1980s. However, we have lots of these very high field magnets in Canada now because Health Canada essentially defers to the FDA on this.

Health committee  Yes, there are a lot of discoveries made that with the right environment could be successful in a Canadian or international context. The SBIR program, that the other two witnesses have mentioned, works well not because it's fundamentally different from Canada's IRAP but because there is capacity among the people who run the SBIR program to actually evaluate technology and make rational decisions about what might be successful and what might not be.

Health committee  It started with curiosity, of course, because no company would want to market a product that they didn't know existed yet. This is the role of fundamental research, to create new products or new ideas that can be turned into products that companies don't even know exist yet. In my case it was very much a push scenario.

Health committee  I have some comments from London, Madam Chair. First you have to define who is good at research and who is failing at research. There are scientists in many different disciplines, of course, and across a great scale, all the way from academia to industry. When you have critical masses in any given area, you start to accumulate more and more talent.

Health committee  Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and members of the committee, for this opportunity to share with you some of my experiences in innovation in medical devices and in drugs in Canada. I'm going to describe a few of my own experiences, and I have some additional examples from my institution in the briefing materials that were provided.

Health committee  Yes, I was. Unfortunately, as you know, income trusts pay out a lot of money, but they don't invest and Air Canada Jazz is one of them. Their aircraft was dead on arrival.