This thing is starting to get a bit unwieldy: federal government, provincial governments, academia, industry. What are its chances of actually getting anything done? Munroe-Blum said the odds of such a meeting succeeding will increase if everyone concentrates on achieving practical results. “It may be that we aim for some pilot project. Choose a sector or two from an industry point of view, business point of view, and bring together the government and university and industry leaders who want to work together.”
And if they have time to talk about some other issues, the sky’s the limit. Naylor rattled off a half-dozen topics that could use government attention. The maze of tax credits for corporate research and development, for instance: “It’s incredibly expensive, it’s often inefficient. At a time when we have falling government revenues it needs a close look.” Or the National Research Council, the feds’ in-house research branch. “We spend $850 million a year on the NRC: is it doing what it needs to do as an applied research and commercialization entity? There’s open questions about that.”
After a decade during which governments from two different parties competed to create a forest of boutique programs to encourage the transfer of new ideas from the laboratory to the market, “it’s alphabet soup,” Naylor said. “It’s almost impossible for anyone who’s trying to build a company to navigate that.”
By the end of our discussion, then, the five presidents had established, at a minimum, that there is a lot more to discuss. Canada’s academic culture gives a serviceable education to millions and is home to pockets of genuine genius, but it often falls a little short of the world’s best. The schools that would like to win by that most exacting standard have precise ideas about how they should change to attain those goals. And they are eager to start a broader conversation about how to help Canada make it through the current economic crisis and get back on the path to greater prosperity.
Coming after a year of constant crisis in Parliament during which very few of the debates were about such substantive matters, the five presidents’ remarks came as a tonic but also as a warning. These are the topics our leaders could discuss, if they could only look up from their tactical skirmishes for a moment. And these are the issues the rest of the world will discuss, and act upon, whether Canada gets its act together or not.
