Richard Gold is the director of McGill University’s Centre for Intellectual Property Policy, chief policy and partnerships officer at Conscience – a non-profit helping to find drugs for rare diseases and antibiotic resistance – and senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
While Canada faces a crisis owing to U.S. President Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs, the United States is undergoing its own violent policy spasms. With the U.S. cutting the budgets of its world leading science institutions – the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – and the universities that conduct research, its dominance in science and innovation is in jeopardy.
Rather than suffer Mr. Trump’s whims passively, Canada can take advantage of his denigration of science. Canada should double down on investing in its science and data infrastructure to become a force in science and innovation.
Innovation drives the modern economy. Universities provide two essential elements that are critical to innovation: training the work force and creating the infrastructure that attracts companies. University graduates power innovation within technology companies and make it possible for other companies to become more productive through adoption of that technology. University researchers also create the large datasets and tools that provide the foundations of innovation, such as the Human Genome Project that underlies the biopharmaceutical industry and the Protein Data Bank that led to the Nobel prize-winning AlphaFold2 that has upended drug discovery.
With uncertainty in the U.S. over research funding and over the topics that researchers can pursue, Canada has the opportunity to increase the standing of its research and set the foundations for a more productive and innovative economy. To achieve this goal, both the federal and provincial governments need to act boldly and decisively.
Canada needs to provide work permits to disenchanted U.S. scientists who have seen their funding threatened and their research put into question. This can be done quickly under existing legislation. Further, Canada needs to attract the world’s top graduate students to work with those researchers. Even if the U.S. scientists return to the U.S. under the next administration, many of those graduate students would remain in Canada and contribute to our economy.
Provinces must reverse funding cuts at universities and invest significantly so that they can provide a home to those U.S. researchers who come to Canada. Quebec would need to reinvest, particularly in McGill University, which is facing an annual cut of $45-million, while Ontario would need to reverse cuts to its universities and colleges that are dismantling programs. The short-term budgetary benefits of cutting postsecondary education is dwarfed by the economic benefits of welcoming the U.S. scientists and turning Canada into a knowledge powerhouse.
Canada also needs to increase its research funding – which is at its lowest levels in inflation-adjusted dollars – to not only support new researchers but to build the data – currently threatened in the U.S. – and the data infrastructure that will attract innovative firms, such as in the artificial intelligence field. Investing in research and developing a plan to ensure that the data that scientists produce feeds into the health and tech industries in Canada are critical to our ability to produce companies that not only drive growth but increase productivity.
Lastly, Canada needs to support partnerships between universities and industry. These partnerships are more efficient in creating innovation and provide a route for graduates to either enter the private sector or create their own companies. This support must recognize that the old ways of organizing partnerships around narrow, closed relationships, is no longer efficient. Instead, as the AI industry has demonstrated: “Open always wins.”
These are bold propositions. But if Canada is to counter the current economic attack from the U.S., it must act boldly to build an economy that not only flies but soars.