Health committee  There's certainly a role. I firmly believe in partnerships. We do a lot of contract research where there's no IP being exchanged, no patents, or if we do these things, we're signing a non-disclosure agreement. We work with companies all over the world, Boston Scientific, Philips, Siemens AG, companies in Waterloo, Ontario.

Health committee  We bring a lot of foreign investment into oil sands, telecommunications, you name it. Why can't we do that in the medical device industry or the drug industry? We had a lot of very successful branch plants like Merck-Frosst in Montreal. They're all gone. For some reason, and I don't know all the reasons, they left.

Health committee  I feel very passionate about this. I think I have a real answer here. The first is a question. What is the difference between Canada, Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq? Only one of these countries does not have a science minister, and that is Canada. From the big picture perspective, one of the reasons we cannot integrate all our programs is that this country does not have a science minister.

Health committee  The SBIR program is run by the National Institutes of Health, which is the equivalent of the CIHR. The SBIR program is a peer-reviewed program. That means our scientific peers help in the evaluation of the technology, the business plan, and all the rest of it. The evaluation officers who administer the program are also skilled in the particular areas.

Health committee  That would be a very good model. It could go with NSERC or CIHR, but the key is that the money has to go with it. You can't ask those agencies to use the money they have to run this program. This is what we keep doing in this country and this does not work.

Health committee  Don, do you want to go first?

Health committee  Yes. We do work with Carol Stephenson, the dean of the Ivey school, as well as a number of people there. We even have a chair that is funded by the federal government, in fact, looking at health care innovation, which Kellie Leitch was instrumental in helping to secure. They are interested in big companies, not small companies and, unfortunately, all the business schools in Canada are interested in producing graduates who want to work for large companies.

Health committee  Wouldn't it be a lovely model if we had partnership funding but that partnership funding came from Canadian industry, Canadian venture capital, and Canadian investor groups rather than large scale multinationals? That would still secure the basic research for the people in academia.

Health committee  I'm not sure I actually know the answer to that. It's a very difficult question. When Stanford started their research institute 50 years ago, they had a lot of space next to a very famous university. With the University of Toronto or the University of British Columbia or my own university, we don't have a lot of space.

Health committee  That's a very good question. That was for filing patents in the United States. Filing patents in Canada is not particularly useful, so we never do it. We file patents, and we do international filing, and eventually it will get filed in Canada, but there's no reason to protect the technology in Canada because nobody's going to steal it from you.

Health committee  Well, if you look at any drug pipeline or medical discovery pipeline, I think you have to fund a hundred seed projects to get one to actually pay off. I think the balance has to be very strongly on the research side, because it's very hard to pick the winner. You basically need the marketplace to ultimately tell you who wins and who loses.

Health committee  That model has saved my research life in Canada, I can tell you, because without it we would have had very little.... I'm very pragmatic. I'm an American living in Canada because I love this country. I've been here for a long, long time. I don't have a problem with my technologies going to the United States or to Germany, but I feel very bad for this country that it happens.

Health committee  No. Go ahead.

Health committee  I would agree with all those comments. In total dollars, we spend quite well per capita, but of course, we only have 30-some million people, and so our total investment in any problem is always small. However, I think we can spend the money that we do spend much more smartly. I would see a number of R and D programs across the country, especially with the National Research Council, being shut down.

Health committee  I have done a little work. I have a colleague who sits three offices away from me, Dr. Blaine Chronik, who's also a Canada research chair. He does a lot of this work for Health Canada. The reality is there is virtually no harmonization with the EU, or even within North America, on devices, drugs, or even electrical systems.