Dr John de la Mothe

Team Play, Not Cash Grabs

By Dr John de la Mothe

OK let’s have it. Canadians have been promised an innovation strategy for years. Now we really need one. In 1983 we were convinced that innovation R&D was critical to our future, to our competitiveness and our standards of living in an integrated, knowledge-based economy. So we believed the government — not without some difficulty — when it said it would help double Canada’s GERD/GDP ratio to rival that of the big G-5.

So the government — recognizing that our business enterprise R&D (BERD) and our rate of commercializing new knowledge from universities to the marketplace was low, relative to the OECD — introduced matching grants, partnership schemes, national centers of excellence, and other leveraged funding arrangements. Then our GERD/GDP ratio was 1.5%. Today it is 1.6%. (Wow.)

In the meantime, the world has not stood still. Recognizing that jobs and growth (remember that phrase?) come ultimately from the private sector, Ireland has doubled its BERD/GDP (from 0.5% in 1990 to more than 1% in 1999, matching Canada). Iceland has too, going from 0.2% in 1990 to 0.75%. Finland has gone from 1.2% in 1990 to 2.2%. Sweden stands at 2.75%. Etc. etc. The world of the G-5 has become crowded. But still, Canada languishes, illusorily “safe” in the penumbra of the branch plant economy, apparently unconcerned with questions of technological sovereignty, secure in the false hope that Nortel, JDS Uniphase and other R&D giants that fortuitously chose Canada as their home will both stay and prosper.

So, to many, the message of the recent Speech From The Throne, that Canada would enter the G-5 in terms of spending and performance by 2010 was good news indeed, reinforced by the widespread rumor that the government was busy cobbling together an innovation strategy, called by some the “Innovation White Paper”.

To be sure, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. The 1996 Science and Technology Review promised an annual report card. We didn’t get it. It promised priorities. We didn’t get them. We were promised commitment. The SBDAs lost serious person years and dollars. And now we’re told that we’ll be going from 15th to 5th. We can only hope. But to do so requires far in excess of 100,000 new researchers — just to stay where we are — and another $16 billion of spending and performance. This is daunting, to say the least, but we’ve got to do it.

To get there we need foresight, teamwork and a strong, clear strategy. The Program Review exercise intimated pretty clearly that horizontal coordination was to become the watchword of this government. It would seem that the central agencies have all but forgotten about that. Instead what the Innovation White Paper process has produced thus far is a gangly collage of disparate proposals for money. This is not a strategy. This is not a vision. But this can become a zoo. The proposals — some very considered and justified, others seemingly bizarre — tip the scales at the moment at over $10 billion. (Does the Canadian Space Agency really need $110 million to “launch a mission to a target in the solar system by the end of the decade”?)

If Canada is going to seriously play in the 21st Century, it has to get its act together. We need a strategy that squarely deals with the business environment, with creating and extending smart and physical infrastructure, with the renewal of our colleges and universities, and with increased levels of funding for basic research (in all fields). We need to revisit our regulatory, risk and legal systems. We need team play, not cash grabs.

Dr John de la Mothe is a professor of international S&T policy at the University of Ottawa