Canada urgently needs to stop the brain drain

Canada’s focus on ramping up capacity to develop and manufacture domestic vaccines, respirators and ventilators to fight COVID-19 and future virus threats makes practical sense, given our current lack of production independence.

We’ve done well to secure large stores of pandemic-related products from international partners and get them to Canadians. But it’s never comfortable — or strong public policy — to allow your fate to rest in the hands of others in a time of crisis.

It’s a situation government decision-makers in Ottawa are keen to avoid repeating. It’s part of the reason why the federal government has announced significant investments to expand biosciences infrastructure, while Health Canada is moving quickly on the review and approval process for manufacturers to develop domestic products and bring them to market during the pandemic.

As much as these actions are welcome, they also reveal a central weakness of Canada’s current science and technology strategy: it’s reactive and inconsistent. It tends to shift from crisis to crisis, rather than adhering to a coherent longterm framework to guide R&D, manufacturing and commercialization in good times and bad. Making matters worse, our existing trade agreements practice “science diplomacy” with no repercussions for science and technology (S&T) gains or losses.

The International Working Group on Global Research, Development & Innovation at the Berkeley Research Group (BRG) Institute, of which I am a member, has written extensively about the changing global S&T landscape and the need to be less reactive. They suggest that S&T policy needs to adapt to the new global, mobile and interconnected reality of science and innovation.

This means G7 countries need to work together to “implement economic and regulatory policies … with an eye toward increasing (each) nation’s ability to capture economic and national security value from new knowledge, wherever it originates,” according to a report last summer in Issues in Science and Technology.

Canada has excellent researchers who provide creative solutions to various problems, but we receive a poor grade for innovation (including commercialization) from the Conference Board of Canada. We are not nearly as successful at converting our ideas, or the ideas of others, into practical made-in-Canada innovations that will benefit Canadians and our economy. As a result, Canada often fails to reap the societal and economic rewards of spending significant public resources to fund academic, medical and scientific research. When these ideas leave the lab, they often go to another country, and there is no economic value returning to Canada.

With our economy battered by the pandemic and so much of our collective attention captured by COVID-19, we can no longer afford to continue the same approach that has allowed domestic development and innovation to languish.

It’s encouraging that Ontario’s government seems to share this sentiment. The province recently launched a new agency — Intellectual Property Ontario — to encourage the development, protection and commercialization of IP. Canada needs a similar focus on the value of innovation on a national and international scale.

The key players who drive research and development — academic institutions, the private sector and government — need a strengthened S&T strategy that gives them the tools to flourish. We need to focus on gaining economic advantage through strategic collaboration on innovation with select partner countries and strengthening our IP protections to ensure we realize the full benefits of our public investments in R&D.

We can start by furthering the conversation started at the Cornwall G7 Summit, formalizing a blueprint of the Cornwall Compact, and developing a plan for its execution. The upcoming June 2022 summit in Germany could serve as a deadline for achieving these objectives.

From Canada’s perspective, crafting a new S&T strategy should begin by identifying areas where our research and capabilities are strongest and the needs are greatest — such as agriculture, health sciences, or clean energy — to help determine opportunities where we should focus our efforts.

We don’t need to start from scratch. Some of this groundwork has already been carried out by recent advisory panels and economic strategy tables in Canada. The key is to get started. The longer we take to build on this foundational work and create a strategy to move forward, the further our global competitiveness will fall.

Bolstering intellectual property protection for Canadian research will be key to any strategy or public policies that aim to foster domestic innovation and development. We can’t risk being naive in a hypercompetitive global marketplace where not all countries play fairly or by the same rules.

We can’t continue to let our IP seep away from us, enabling other international players to reap benefits from commercialization that could have created much-needed jobs and economic activity in Canada (cautionary tales of the past include Nortel, BlackBerry and Element AI).

Strengthening our IP protection will also enable us to explore avenues to create strategic partnerships with other countries who recognize the value of our ideas and may be willing to co-develop them for a share of the benefits.

International trade has changed dramatically in recent years as technology has made the world smaller and closed the distances between countries. In many ways, modern trade is driven more by ideas and innovation than by materials and currency markets.

Canada is fortunate to have a wealth of brilliant people with great ideas. What we need now is a new strategy to capture the benefits of these ideas.