INST Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON INDUSTRY, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

COMITÉ PERMANENT DE L'INDUSTRIE, DES SCIENCES ET DE LA TECHNOLOGIE

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Thursday, November 29, 2001

• 0921

[English]

The Chair (Ms. Susan Whelan (Essex, Lib.)): I'm going to call the meeting to order, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), a study on the three federal granting agencies, peer review funding, and the Canada research chairs program.

We're very pleased to welcome here today a number of witnesses. We have with us this morning Dr. Bryan Poulin, professor from the faculty of business administrators at Lakehead University; Dr. Peter Frise, professor, faculty of mechanical and design engineering, University of Windsor; Dr. Ian Dohoo, professor of epidemiology, associate dean, University of P.E.I., graduate studies and research; and Dr. Donald Forsdyke, professor, department of biochemistry, Queen's University.

First I want to apologize for the room change. Water is on its way. I do thank you for coming here. I know there were some delays due to the weather this morning, but we are here now.

I would propose that we have opening comments from each, hopefully no longer than five minutes, and then we'll turn to questions. I'm going to begin in the order I've read, unless there's a different agreement with Dr. Poulin.

Mr. Bryan J. Poulin (Individual Presentation): That's fine, thank you.

Before I begin, perhaps it's worth mentioning that I have no axe to grind. I would be happy to report the merits of peer review if the evidence were to support this.

In front of you is a statement prepared by myself and Dr. Richard Gordon, a biomedical researcher at the University of Manitoba. I'm an organizational researcher at Lakehead University.

Please excuse the French translation of the statement, which I can circulate. We put it through a translation program right at the end, and I've been told by somebody who is fluent in French—I'm not—that the translation is mechanical.

Can I just pass this around?

The Chair: The clerk's going to come and get that.

Mr. Bryan Poulin: It's not as long as that; we have a couple of attachments.

My father's from the Quebec City area, but he moved to British Columbia and then we moved overseas for a decade or more to a unilingual English-speaking country. So when we came back to Canada, I came back without my French, unfortunately. I apologize for that.

The Chair: We have the copy now, Dr. Poulin, if you'd like to continue.

Mr. Bryan Poulin: Thank you for this opportunity to comment on improving peer review and improving the granting processes used by the federal government agencies in scientific and medical research.

• 0925

Peer review has come under increasing criticism as a means of funding research. For example, see our article entitled How to organize science funding: the new Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), an opportunity to vastly increase innovation. This was published in Canadian Public Policy this past spring.

Last year we published a review of Dr. Donald Forsdyke's recent book on Canadian research, Tomorrow's Cures Today? How to Reform the Health Research System. The review was also published in Canadian Public Policy last year.

We are not against discriminating among science research projects, and peer review may be a useful means of discriminating priorities. After all, there's a limit any country can afford to spend on science and scientific research. However, our preliminary investigation suggests the present state of peer review and winner-take-all models of funding is unlikely to lead to either fair or optimal results. This is because peer review tends toward competition that can be overly aggressive and decisions that often have conflict-of-interest aspects.

Further, peer review, especially in the most creative stages of research, does not foster the cooperation and trust required for truly creative and cooperative research and learning to flourish, or even permit a modicum of funding to get it off the ground. Outcomes of peer review and granting processes that are based upon it include at least the following five.

Almost everyone in the scientific community would agree there is denial of many good ideas by qualified and skilled researchers. There is also a promotion of distrust among the scientific community in the fairness of the process. If the above two are true, this would certainly lead to a sub-optimization of science and scientific innovation. There's also a loss of research effort by people paid to do research with few or no resources to do it with.

We would contend that the above charges are supportable, but they would need further investigation for us to come to a definitive position.

We would also argue, in support, that industry and institutional best practice at, for example, 3M Corporation, the former Bell Canada International Inc. labs, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health—especially their intramural programs—strongly argues for cooperative, not competitive, conditions for innovation to flourish, with start-up funds available for new ideas almost without barriers or hurdles.

What we see needed to support or refute the arguments of critics and supporters of the present peer review and funding systems is not surveys of ungrounded opinion, even if heartfelt. Too often these are little more than articles of faith, such as the all too typical claim by the new Canadian Institutes of Health Research of their “strong tradition of excellence in research through the peer review process”. We would say that is an article of faith.

This seems surprising, since data is available in the federal granting institutions to find out if peer review really works as a fair and efficient discriminating device. For example, if peer review is not generally applicable to all stages of the innovation process—and we suspect it is not—then it should be reserved for the stage or stages where it is appropriate. Even here, it will likely need to be modified to guard against misuse by vested, counterproductive interests.

In summary, we see there is little scientific evidence for the efficacy of peer review in general. In the words of psychopharmacologist David Horrobin in the U.K., the very little evidence there is suggests that peer review is “little better than chance” and “may have destroyed rather than promoted innovation”.

This assessment of the preliminary evidence is in keeping with our own hypothesis, supported as it is by the success of notable private and government research institutions that do not use peer review for assessing the merits of launching new scientific and medical research initiatives. Therefore, our tentative position at this time is that scientific research on peer review is an open question, and we see studies on peer review and the related granting process as having barely begun. It is perhaps avoided precisely because the overriding political agenda of scientists is to increase funding, maybe with less regard to the efficiency with which the funds are spent.

• 0930

Our advice is that we as a community must not pursue peer review in granting decisions in unscientific ways, largely unexamined, and thus we call for research on the question of peer review.

In closing, I say that good science has always meant more than going with the opinion of the day. We've all studied in school and been shown how scientific advance has oftentimes been resisted, and this includes going against our own opinion. If the evidence goes against our own opinion, we hope we would fairly report this.

At the very least, good science means conducting reliable, repeatable scientific research on both consistency of past reviews and the impacts of decisions taken. In the interim, we believe we should be cautious in applying the largely untested peer review system that has become the norm. Therefore, our main suggestion is that until this research is done, funds be made more available to a wider body of qualified researchers.

For more detail on this, we refer you again to the Canadian Public Policy article that we wrote, “How to organize science funding: the new Canadian Institutes for Health Research, an opportunity to increase innovation”. The abstract is attached to this statement, both in English and French, and also included is the English version of our review of Dr. Forsdyke's insightful book on the same question.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Poulin.

I will now turn to Dr. Peter Frise.

Mr. Peter R. Frise (Individual Presentation): Thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here to speak to the issues of research and education that I consider to be of central importance to the future social and economic well-being of our country.

I'd like to start by stating that I am not a critic of the present system. I'm a strong proponent, but I do have some suggestions and some questions about it. I think that with some work the system, which is excellent, in my view, could be made even better and more effective.

I read the committee's fifth report to Parliament and I find it, overall, a good examination of the issues. I applaud the whole notion of developing a long-term, long-range innovation strategy for Canada, and I would submit that there are three key issues on the innovation strategy that must be considered. I'd like to propose some simple definitions to this end.

Research is the practice of turning wealth into ideas. Innovation is the practice of turning ideas into wealth. And education is the practice of turning people into citizens who can be innovative and generate more wealth. In my view, all three of these issues—research, innovation, and education—are inextricably linked, and to treat one without the other will not generate success for Canada's future.

I have some specific remarks about some of the issues that are posed in the invitation I received to this hearing. The decision-making process is of the three federal granting agencies. A review process is a necessary part of the start-up of any new initiative, whether it's a research grant, a business proposal or even a piece of legislation. The review process of a research proposal is, in effect, a sober second look at the proposal. In effect, it's a sanity check by experts in the field, who should apply an appropriate, fair-minded, and objective set of criteria in evaluating the merit of the proposed project with a view to either improving a good piece of work or suggesting alternatives in the case of an unsuccessful proposal. The key thing is that the criteria must be appropriate to the field, and the right people, who understand the aims of the program under which the proposal has been submitted, must apply them fairly and objectively.

The measure to be applied in evaluating any research proposal has been and must remain, in my respectful submission, excellence. Nothing but excellence can be used as a criteria for allocating public funds to a research project, but the criteria to be used in judging excellence must be relevant to the field being considered. There is no universally applicable criterion for judging excellence across all of the disciplines supported by Canada's granting agencies. For example, the number of scientific publications that have been written by a researcher may be seen to be a convenient measure to apply in assessing excellence, but this measure must be tempered when used in different disciplines where publishing has different meanings and where the forums for publishing are different.

• 0935

In my own field of design engineering, it is the number of students educated in design techniques and practice that is the most important measure of quality and excellence, because it's these young engineers who will design the products that will bring employment and prosperity to thousands of other Canadians and keep the economy going to pay for everything else. In contrast, the opportunity to publish in peer-reviewed journals is somewhat limited in my field; thus, applying a simple publication count would be inappropriate in this key field of endeavour.

It's important to note that NSERC has recognized these facts and has moved positively to ensure that different measures of quality are applied in different disciplines under their mandate—by, for example, having a strong committee of experts develop a new set of guidelines for the review of engineering research proposals. This has necessitated a difficult culture change among the peer review committees, who are, after all, us. But this change is beginning to take place, and I'm greatly encouraged by it. As long as the requirements of a fair and objective application of relevant and appropriate criteria by knowledgeable people who understand the aims of the program are met, then the process, I think, will be a good one.

The second issue is the current and future issues facing recipients of funds from granting agencies. Engineering education has often been likened to taking a drink from a fire hose: the student is thirsty and water is available, but there's an input/output rate mismatch that causes problems for most students. This high-pressure environment is what faces educators and researchers today, and that makes things both exciting and difficult at the same time. It's illustrative of what is the most difficult issue facing recipients of grant funds today: the balance of the varied and competing demands on the time of the researcher. This has always been the case in every professional field, including your own field of Parliament, but in my experience, and in talking with more senior colleagues, this balance is becoming more difficult and the pressures on faculty members are becoming more intense, resulting in significant stress among many excellent people—to the detriment of the education system, in my view.

I feel this is happening to the point where in certain fields it's becoming difficult to attract the best people to do PhDs and then progress into careers in academe. In other words, it's not clear to me who will be teaching the young Canadians of tomorrow.

I believe we have a responsibility as recipients of public funds to do work in our research programs that will benefit the public who provided the funds and will meet the aims of the programs under which the funds were provided. Coupled with that responsibility to do useful research is the more immediate need to work with our students, who must be taught, led, encouraged, mentored, inspired, and coached, so that they're ready for the world-class challenges that await them in the next phase of their careers.

This really calls forth the key point I'd like to bring to the committee—the fact that teaching and research are intertwined in so many ways that they're indivisible and cannot be thought of as little pockets of separate activity easily divided. This intermingling of teaching and research extends to virtually all aspects of the issue of Canada's innovation system that is before the committee. This includes the whole issue of funding, infrastructure, the future availability of faculty members, and the overall performance of our nation as an innovative society with a high standard of living and a quality of life we hope to pass on to our children.

The future funding needs of the science and technology community in Canada will, in my view, be largely as they are now, except that we'll need to have increased levels of support for staff and infrastructure in order to put that funding to good use. Without technical and administrative staff, we could easily have laboratories full of wonderful equipment with nobody to operate it, or have lecture classrooms with nobody teaching in them because the profs are all in their new research labs. In my view, neither situation is acceptable, and this dilemma forms the crux of the issue at hand.

As for the specific needs and concerns of smaller universities and gaining insight into the funding problems faced by those institutions, I think this question deals with the issue of research partnership programs and whether or not small institutions should be placed in some special category. In some ways this does seem fair, because larger institutions may have an opportunity to spread both their costs and their external fundraising efforts over a larger base, thereby gaining an advantage over smaller institutions. On the other hand, to characterize excellence as either small or large, in my view, is not a good idea because it places artificial constraints on what an institution can do or aspire to do and whom it can work with because of its size relative to other institutions. This has nothing to do with the excellence found in those institutions.

• 0940

Research partnerships work because of a number of factors, including, but not limited to, geographic proximity, concordance of views on the mission of the partnership, and mostly, on personal trust and goodwill between the partners. None of these issues has anything whatever to do with the size of an institution or its research partners in industry. It may be that the smaller institution has focused its efforts to the extent that, in a given field of endeavour, it is actually stronger than larger institutions. I feel this type of focus is very much to be encouraged, since it concentrates expertise and builds a critical mass of capability for the future.

In my view, the value of a partnership is not in the relative size of the partners; it is in the people who make up the partnership and in the impact they can have on the quality of life for Canadians and on the education of our young people through their partnership. The key things to be sought in evaluating any research proposal, especially one involving a partnership, are excellence and potential impact on Canada's future.

I think that ends my remarks. I'm sorry I don't have copies, but I can turn this over to the clerk.

The Chair: That would be great.

Thank you very much, Dr. Frise.

I'm now going to turn to Dr. Ian Dohoo, professor from the University of P.E.I.

Mr. Ian Dohoo (Individual Presentation): Honourable members, thank you for the invitation to appear before this committee. You should have in front of you a copy of my opening remarks, which are available in both English and French.

Before I start I would like to just make the observation that my comments are going to be very specifically related to the area I'm familiar with, and that's animal health research.

Although I'm appearing today as an individual researcher, this appearance is really the result of an effort carried out with colleagues at all four Canadian veterinary colleges over the past 16 months. During that period we have had considerable correspondence with NSERC in an attempt to resolve a long-standing problem with the funding of animal health research, but with little progress so far.

There is no doubt that animal health and animal health research is an important issue for Canada and for Canadians. Recent examples such as hog cholera in the Netherlands, foot-and-mouth disease and mad cow disease in the United Kingdom, E. coli in Walkerton, and an increasing demand by consumers for food that is both safe and produced with less reliance on antibiotics and other chemical inputs all point to the need for animal health research in this country.

Animal health research can be divided into two fundamentally different but complementary types. The first type, and the one that probably comes to mind immediately, is research that is conducted in laboratories under controlled conditions, in which the investigator manipulates all the conditions of the research. NSERC has two grant selection committees that will fund this type of research.

The second type of research, though, is that which is carried out under real world conditions, working with animal owners and their veterinarians. It's essential to understanding how diseases behave and the impact they have. This research is primarily observational in nature and relies on careful recording of data under real world conditions and statistical analysis of those data to sort out the complex web of factors that affect animal health.

One specific example of this type of research, and one in which I was personally involved and with which you may be familiar, was the review of the adverse animal health effects of bovine growth hormone that we carried out at the request of Health Canada.

The two types of animal health research use completely different methodologies. To ask a basic science, laboratory-based researcher to evaluate an observational real-world research proposal would be analogous to asking an art historian to evaluate a genomics project. Unfortunately, NSERC has neither a mechanism nor the expertise to review or fund this real-world research. NSERC's perspective on the issue is that there is no problem, since it doesn't receive proposals for funding of this type of research. The reason they receive no proposals is that investigators will not submit proposals until there is an appropriate grant selection committee in place.

The consequences of this problem are several. First, many animal health researchers in this country have to rely on industry, producer groups, and provincial government funding to support their research activities. Unfortunately, none of these funding sources is really designed to support long-term focused research programs. However, the lack of access to NSERC grants has other very profound effects. Most importantly, granting council funding has now become the primary measure of research activity, particularly when it comes to access to other federal funding programs.

For example, a university's allocation of Canada research chairs depends on the level of granting council funding it holds. Consequently, it's not surprising that universities will only allocate chairs to those programs that generate granting council support. As a result of this, none of these real-world research programs at any of the four Canadian veterinary colleges has access to this Canada research chairs program, despite the fact that at least two of these four programs are extremely strong and well recognized internationally. The serious consequence for Canada is that much of the research necessary to understand how disease behaves in our animal populations, what impacts they have, and how new technologies can effectively be used to control them is not being done.

• 0945

So what's the solution? Well, in the recent transformation of the Medical Research Council into the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the need to fund the full spectrum of health research from basic laboratory research to real-world or population- and clinical-based research was clearly recognized, and that's been built into the four pillars each institute is built upon.

Ideally we need the same sort of transformation—the same approach to animal health research—at NSERC. Until we resolve this problem, animal health research in Canada is going to remain severely disadvantaged and the training of the next generation of highly skilled professionals severely compromised. I share with Dr. Frise the real concern about our ability to train the next generation of highly skilled professionals in the animal health field.

With that, I'll conclude my remarks and be happy to entertain questions later.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Dohoo.

I'm now going to turn to Dr. Donald Forsdyke, professor from Queen's University.

Mr. Donald Forsdyke (Individual Presentation): Chairperson Whelan, ladies and gentlemen.

Those who are perceived as having attained excellence in a given field are most likely to be asked for advice in that field. They become labelled as experts, and governments, assuming their advice to be the best available, call upon them to testify. If the subject were ice hockey or ballet, perhaps Wayne Gretzky or Evelyn Hart would be sitting here.

It follows that if the processes by which the Gretzkys and Harts become labelled as experts were flawed, then government would be less likely to get the best advice. Because ice hockey players and ballet dancers are in the public domain, their excellence can be evaluated both by their peers and by the public at large. However, when the subject is scientific research, this does not apply. We depend entirely on some form of peer review to judge excellence, and this process alone defines those who will be considered experts. If the peer review process were flawed, then the Canadian taxpayer would be footing the bill not only for inferior research, but also for inferior advice.

Now while we might, despite inferior research, survive in the short term by exploiting the originality and creativity of scientists in other countries, it is certain that even in the short term we would not survive in the 21st century with inferior advice. I'm talking about survival itself. I'm not just talking about the gross domestic product and the quality of life. Problems such as AIDS, bioterrorism, genetically modified food, mad cow disease, and the poisoning of the biosphere demand advice from those best equipped to address them.

Forty years' involvement in biomedical research in the U.K. and Canada have led me to believe that peer review as currently practised is highly flawed. Government—and, yes, the research councils themselves—are not getting advice from the brightest and the best. Indeed, a person incorrectly designated as expert is more likely to incorrectly designate others as experts. These in turn will incorrectly designate others, and so on. Thus there's a built-in multiplier, which threatens to send the entire system spiralling out of control.

From some of the events we read of daily in our newspapers—Oliviera, Koren, Grinstein, Healy, Cuticchia; some of these names have become household words—it might be inferred that the system is already out of control.

Recent happenings at the University of Toronto have alerted the general public, which is now coming to suspect that the system is broken. If there is ever a time for discarding the honeyed assurances of the Neville Chamberlains and listening to the Churchills, it is now.

I experienced the blitz in London during World War II. My father, in the navy, survived three sinkings by torpedoes. I graduated in medicine at London University and gained a PhD in biochemistry at Cambridge. The great dangers threatening our civilization have seldom been far from my consciousness. Some of my first publications in the U.K. were in the Journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Here, in the 1960s, I warned of covert terrorism and of the dangers of biological warfare.

When I arrived at Queen's University in 1968 I envisaged that I would be able to balance the various demands on my time and, while continuing my research program and general university duties, would be able to continue developing my expertise in strategic matters. Thus, if called upon, I would be in a position to advise government.

• 0950

To my amazement, I found I had, like Alice in Wonderland, landed in a strange Mad Hatter's world dominated by a peer review system that has been described by Nobelist Joshua Lederberg as having become “vicious beyond imagination” and by Nobelist Phillip Sharp as having taken on a “mask of madness”. It soon became evident that I would need to attend to serious immediate problems in my own backyard rather than to keep myself informed on bioterrorism.

I had anticipated I would be writing one grant application every five years, so over a research career of 40 years I might have to write eight applications. Instead, I found that I was sometimes writing as many as eight applications a year. This was not exceptional. A geological engineer at Queen's estimates he spends a third of his time writing grant applications and submits six proposals a year.

The taxpayer is footing the bill for all this. If you found the people you had hired to add a garage to your house were spending a third of their time playing cards, you would protest loudly. The notion that writing a grant application is a useful exercise that helps an applicant sort out his or her ideas is false. Grant writing is an exercise in marketing and politics. It is playing cards. It has nothing whatsoever to do with creative research. Canada cannot afford to waste the time of its talented people in this way.

In fact, the first rule of writing applications is not to be creative. As anyone can learn by reading accounts of great discoveries in the past, novel ideas are often difficult to articulate and difficult to understand. To put an original idea on a grant application is akin to professional suicide. People suffering the affliction of originality must either bring this deviant trait to order or get out of scientific research.

It might be thought that current peer review procedures, despite their flaws, are better than simply allocating funds by tossing a coin. But coin tossing at least gives excellence a fighting change. In fact, the current system is worse than coin tossing since it actively selects against excellence.

In general—and thankfully, there are some exceptions—we fund those who have found a safe academic haven by seeking more of the obvious. In the 19th century safe academic havens were found by describing new species of plants and animals, not by supporting Mendel and Bateson, who were struggling to create the science of genetics, upon which much of the progress of 20th century bioscience came to depend.

Today the struggle is the same. Safe havens are found by describing genes, preferably those with some disease connection and of interest to pharmaceutical companies, not by trying to understand how our genomes work through the new science of the 21st century, bioinformatics. Until such an understanding is obtained, quick-fix attempts at gene therapy may open unforeseen Pandora's boxes.

I do not just carp. I have come up with an alternative to the current peer review system, which I call “bicameral review”. In my opening remarks I outlined this in a little more detail, and if you so wish, I will later on in the proceeding read it out.

Rather than continue with my opening remarks, I will conclude with a final word. Events of the last few decades have shown that small groups with an imaginary or real sense of injustice and a little technical know-how can disrupt peace in powerful ways. We must bolster our mental health system as an antidote to imaginary injustice. The only antidote to real injustice is to ensure that such injustice does not occur.

You will recall the Fabricant case in 1992, when the professor went on a shooting rampage at Concordia University. Here the level of real injustice was sufficient to push over the brink someone who in other circumstances might have behaved sanely. We have been foot-dragging too long. Unless the problems of peer review injustice are properly addressed, we may find that the present anthrax scare is but a grim harbinger of even worse tragedies.

Thank you.

The Chair: Dr. Forsdyke, I think maybe it would be better if you did explain what “bicameral review” is. Why don't we do that now before we go to questions?

Mr. Donald Forsdyke: Thank you.

• 0955

I do not just carp. I have come up with an alternative to the current peer review system I call “bicameral review”. Over the past decades I have communicated this in briefs to National Research Council executives. Much of it has been published as journal articles, and several of these articles have been collected together in a book entitled, Tomorrow's Cures Today? How to Reform the Health Research System. I have had a web page on peer review up and running for two years. I'm a founding member of the Canadian Association for Responsible Research Funding. Reading transcripts of previous hearings of this committee, I frequently find the phrase that like democracy, peer review is a terrible system, but it's the best we have. In fact, bicameral review has been on the table for at least a decade.

What is bicameral review? As the name suggests, there are two reviewing bodies, not one. One body is a committee of peers as in the present system. The other is the grant agency itself. The information needs of the two bodies are different. This is because the grant decision process has two components, one relating to the person and one relating to the project. There are just two questions: Should this person be funded? How much funding does his or her project need?

Under bicameral review the first decision is made by the committee of peers, who only review the applicant's track record, not the applicant's proposed project. The second decision is made in-house by specialists in the funding agency, who with respect to budget justification only review the applicant's proposed project, not the applicant's track record. Now, the underlying premise of bicameral review is that for reasons spelled out above and expanded upon by the previous speakers, the evaluation of research projects that have been proposed is highly error-prone. As any Bay Street analyst will tell you, the golden rules for operating in error-prone environments are just two: use only the most objective parameters, and hedge your bets. In the context of bicameral review, these rules translate into getting the committee of peers only to evaluate track record and the grant agency to allocate funds on a sliding scale.

Track record is assessed as a ratio of achievement to funds received. Researchers are made accountable. From those to whom much has been given, much should be expected. Armed with the peer review ratings, the grant agency then decides what funds are needed, and, following the hedging principle, disburses them on a sliding scale. Those at the top of the scale get 100% of what they are deemed to need; those just below the top get, say, 80%. This progresses to the bottom, where the applicant may get only 10% of what he or she needs. That in a nutshell is bicameral review.

There are many details, which are dealt with elsewhere. With bicameral review there will be more justice than under the present system. Now there is a sharp cut-off line. Those whose rating is a point below the line receive the same capital sentence as those at the bottom of the rating scale. Under the sliding scale proposal the punishment fits the crime. Although there are those who will swear that their research programs will collapse unless they receive at least $100,000 a year, in fact quantity of funds is most likely to determine the rate of progress, not whether any progress is possible at all.

I can attest to this. I have managed for many years with one technician, who resisted the lure of more stably funded laboratories and continued to work, sometimes for only half a day a week. We all made progress, albeit sometimes slowly. Despite meagre funding, I published around a hundred papers relevant to AIDS, cancer, and immune system diseases. In the nineties, my bioinformatic analyses of genomes led to a new understanding of the problem Charles Darwin described as the mystery of mysteries, the origin of species. In a recent book I identified Darwin's close research associate, George Romanes, born in Kingston in 1848, as one of Canada's unsung heroes.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Forsdyke.

Now I am going to turn to questioning. If the question is not directed at you but you have a comment, if you could just so indicate, I will recognize you as well.

[Translation]

You have the floor, Mr. Bergeron.

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron (Verchères—Les-Patriotes, BQ): Thank you, Madam Chair.

• 1000

Thank you for accepting our invitation and for sharing your views with us.

First of all, let me just say that you bring a very interesting and relevant perspective to our current study. We asked Mr. Forsdyke to explain his alternative approach to us, and I have to admit that Mr. Poulin warned us a bit when he said that he was short on time, that he wouldn't be able to present his alternate plan, and that we could always refer to his summary.

I'm tempted to ask you to give us more details about you proposed alternative to the current peer review process.

[English]

The Chair: Mr. Poulin.

Mr. Bryan Poulin: Thank you.

It's not dissimilar in principle to Dr. Forsdyke's. Ours is an interim measure, and it would mean that instead of having a sliding scale, we would look at the three stages of ideas being brought to commercial reality. Because the idea stage is rather inexpensive to fund, we would have qualified researchers making a very simple application, and that application, unless there were some great reasons to object—which I could hardly foresee—would be funded. It would be approved at the idea stage.

When we get into a more serious stage and want to see if this idea is feasible—and that's where most of the research effort occurs—then we would entertain a peer review system similar to Dr. Forsdyke's, where researchers would be funded to the level of promise—or potential. When it gets to commercialization, which is much beyond most universities' or researchers' interests, because we need to enter the kind of thing Dr. Peter Frise does, which is make arrangements with industry, then we would look for joint contribution with industry, and that would be a sign that commercialization is possible. On that one we'd look for industry involvement as a test.

• 1005

In simple form, all researchers should receive some funding, as long as they're qualified. Our argument for that is we're already paying $80,000 a year, plus all the benefits, to people to sit in the universities and do research, and we're not even providing them with a modicum of funding to have a research assistant pursue the research with them.

In a nutshell, we should be more widely distributed until we find out if the peer review system is fatally flawed. If it's fatally flawed, it needs an overhaul. If it's only flawed because there's been one broad-brush treatment, and we need to look at different ways of applying review to different stages of the process, then we would be more refined. But right now we should broadly spread it around, since we really don't know if the peer review system we have now is effective.

We have an inability to assess particular programs by the reviewers themselves. They're expert in one area, but does it mean they are able to look at others? The answer is no. If it's outside their field of interest, chances are they're not able to review it. So we have some flaws there.

We also have—it's not polite to say, but I'll say it anyway—conflict of interest issues. Other people will speak to this later, but I'll just say one word on it. If we have an international panel of peer reviewers, and Canadian researchers want to pursue this because it's in the priority interests of Canada, how can we be assured... They'll say, “We can do that work. It's going to move over to Canadian labs, and Canadian researchers are going to be able to do this work. We'd likely have it in our own backyard, so why do we necessarily want to give this approval?” So there are conflict of interest issues.

When we have a very competitive environment, which is what we have now, that competition can be vicious. We only need to look at the airline industry to see how vicious competition can be counterproductive. This is what's happening in some cases, not all cases.

I'll say a final word here. If we go in and look at the data that is readily available in the government-funded institutions, we'll be able to evaluate the peer review process, as well as the results, outcomes, and impact of the research funded by the decisions taken to date. So we're just asking, over the long term, for an opportunity to go in, look at and evaluate, in a scientific way, the data that's already available and is being funded by Canadian taxpayers and the government, and sometimes collected on the streets—collected in the houses to pursue medical research, for example.

So in the long term we want to look at it. In the short term, let's spread it around more widely until we have clear answers. That's what we're saying.

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: Since the clock is running, I'm going to pick up the pace a little. I have one question for Mr. Poulin, and one for Mr. Forsdyke.

First off, Mr. Poulin, I understand what you're saying. There is some merit to your proposal, but allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment. If we spread these grant funds around even more thinly, do we not run the risk of not being able to consolidate research projects so that instead of being able to do in-depth research, we would be confined to smaller, fragmented research initiatives.

Perhaps my question will pit your position against that of Mr. Dohoo. You maintain that your bicameral review proposal gives granting agencies the power to make project decisions based on the funds available. However, according to Mr. Dohoo, the granting agencies are themselves experiencing some difficulty adapting to the new realities. Therefore, how can we expect that in the case of a project such as yours, in light of the comments made by Mr. Dohoo, granting agencies will be in a real position to meet the overall research needs of the sector?

[English]

The Chair: Dr. Forsdyke.

• 1010

Mr. Donald Forsdyke: Clearly, if there's some project that needs a lot of money, it sounds great, let's give them the go-ahead; we'll make great progress. But there's a trade-off here. I mean, you simply don't know; you can't predict the future. This whole process of evaluation is an error-prone process. So, yes, you may be throwing the baby out with the bath water if you do not give a superb lab 100% of what it needs.

Therefore, we have to start off with certain commonsense assumptions. Yes, we need to do more research into this process, but some things are pretty well commonsensical that a process by which one group of human beings evaluates another group of human beings is error prone. As a result, we have to design a system, and when we start building up the system from the grassroots we must start with that basis. We need to design a system that acknowledges that it is fundamentally error prone.

We use that as the starting point. We don't put a system in place that looks nice and then say maybe we'll make a few mistakes. We start off saying this is fundamental and then we build on it. This is what I've done with bicameral review: yes, we may be throwing out some superb projects because we don't give them enough funds, but at the same time we may be giving some poor projects, or what are perceived as poor projects, no funds and destroying something that later on emerges as very important.

If I might give you an example from my own work on AIDS, the AIDS project, AIDS burst on the world in the early 1980s, and progress at the start was quite fantastic. It was very rapidly identified as due to a virus and due to a retrovirus. This was bad news because we all knew that with retroviruses, unlike other viruses, you can't simply design a magic bullet with which to hit them. Retroviruses have what's known as latency. They go to sleep; they hide. In fact, the problem of getting a retrovirus is rather like going grouse shooting. That is, you bring your guns along but you also need beaters and dogs to go into the undergrowth and bring up the birds. Then, when they're up there, you can pop and shoot them down.

Anyone in the field knew this. Unfortunately, different people had different expertise and different skills to bring to the process. One of the first major advances was the discovery of a drug called AZT. The AZT people immediately seized the high ground; they had this drug and everyone thought it was wonderful. Of course, AZT didn't work, so they then looked around, did some beautiful experiments, and came up with the protease inhibitors. They didn't work, so they combined them. They got more drugs, gave them a snappy name, called it highly active anti-retroviral therapy, and gave it a nice little acronym, HAART. And still people were dying with AIDS. It wasn't working and the costs were skyrocketing out of all proportion—and this was an unending treatment; you couldn't stop it.

My area of expertise is studying how to get grouse to fly up—I have some knowledge in that area with respect to AIDS—and I was writing grant applications. I got one from the American Association for AIDS Research, but basically my applications were going to people who'd already seized the high ground and they were getting turned down.

In 1991, I eventually wrote a full paper describing very clearly the twofold approach of how you would hit the AIDS virus on the wing. We'd need two drugs, one to bring it up out of the undergrowth and the other to shoot it down. I sketched this out very clearly. Years went by. In 1998, suddenly, all the experts who'd been getting all the money for years and years and years said “Oh, this is a retrovirus. It has latency. We're not really hitting it. We must find new drugs that will attack this virus and bring it up.” They suddenly... as though they hadn't known all along.

• 1015

I am amazed by this. Politically, this means that certain people, because they are able to parlay this line of approach, have risen into very high positions, and I'm thinking particularly of Dr. Fauci at the National Institutes of Health. He is now not only AIDS czar, but the czar in the whole realm of infectious diseases—

The Chair: Dr. Forsdyke, we try not to mention names while we're—

Mr. Donald Forsdyke: Okay.

Well, people in very high positions are now being called upon to give advice about bioterrorism. And these people have risen through ignorance. They knew from day one that this disease was a latent virus. They needed to attack the latency issue and they haven't supported research in that area. Now we're calling these people experts and expecting them to advise us in areas where they have even less expertise.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Bergeron. I'm going to have to move on to Mr. Bagnell.

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: There was another answer from Dr. Poulin.

The Chair: Oh, was there? Very briefly, then, because we're well over time.

Mr. Bryan Poulin: I'll keep it very brief.

I support profoundly Dr. Forsdyke's opinion on this. I'll bring only one example.

My example took place in the energy crisis that happened just before I left to go overseas for an extended tenure, a hiatus away from Canada, and that was in making buildings more energy efficient. We poured in, at that time, $1 billion. The Canadian government spent over $1 billion to stuff buildings full of insulation and make them so airtight that... I think later, when I was gone on tenure, you found a new way of making the air clean inside the houses, but the environment was not as safe as it was before inside those houses.

Dr. Timusk of the University of Toronto had worked with a Swedish researcher and they came up with a much more promising effort. They'd gone back to the fundamentals of science and looked at the way heat transfers out through an envelope, but his funding application received absolutely no support whatsoever because all the money had been given to the insulation stuffers.

It would be comical if it weren't so serious. Nothing has happened since 1980, because the oil prices collapsed in the early 1980s, as we all know, and energy efficiency was, of course, no longer a priority. It will raise its ugly head sometime in the future and the price of energy will go through the roof because the resources are finite. But it may not happen, and we don't know when it's going to happen. In the meantime, we've done no follow-up research on this work that was finished, I think, pretty much about the mid-1980s.

This is another example of not hedging your bets. What we're saying is that at the idea stage, please hedge your bets. When it gets more serious and we get closer to commercialization, we'll have to make the big bets and spend the big dollars. But what we're doing is one kind of solution for different situations. We need to be much more flexible. And Dr. Forsdyke's opinion is being more flexible. Ours is saying “Don't even worry about it at the idea stage. It's so cheap and you get such a good hit. Why not fund people with promising ideas?”

The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Poulin.

Mr. Bagnell, please.

Mr. Larry Bagnell (Yukon, Lib.): Thank you.

Thank you all for coming with some excellent ideas. It's also great to see the entire Bergeron team here again today.

My first question is not related to anything anyone has said, but it's great to have a northern colleague here—my riding is in the Yukon—so that's what I want to address. I want to go on record—I've brought this up at every hearing—and make it categorical that I think there should be more research in the north. Half of Canada's country is in the north, but there are no universities; there are community colleges. I don't think we do enough research in the north, by northerners, for the north.

I do not know whether or not it can fit into the existing model, but do you have any suggestions? I ask especially Dr. Poulin first, coming from the north. Second, are there any ways in which we might encourage research in the north by northerners?

One of the reasons I'm emphasizing this today is because I've been talking to MPs Karen Kraft Sloan and our arctic expert, Clifford Lincoln, who are both promoting research in the north as well.

Mr. Bryan Poulin: I believe that each region can produce excellence and I don't believe it has to do with north or south. To deny the north making their own contributions would be a denial of opportunity for Canada.

One of the advantages of being isolated is that there can be a certain perspective gained on what's happening around. Canada has been able to do that internationally because we've stood apart from the issues that faced other people and had more perspective.

• 1020

I believe—and the American Constitution certainly recognized this—that people in remote areas had much to contribute to the whole American system of inquiry.

I believe the north should fully participate in inquiry and research, and we should stimulate that. If I could make one plug for the north, I'd make a plug for the northern medical school, not only that it be in Thunder Bay, but maybe somewhere in the far north so we could get people who, because they took the training in the north, would self-select to stay in the north and make a contribution. We'd have a widely dispersed effort coming from all regions of the country, not just one region, even if it's the southern part of the north, where I come from.

Mr. Larry Bagnell: Great.

You presented some very interesting new models here. I think the criticism of the peer review might have been a bit of hyperbole, for example, saying it “actively selects against excellence”. I think, obviously, there has to be some excellence in the system. If we pick researchers in the area, some professors, as opposed to someone off the street like me or Paddy, who know nothing about it, obviously you're more likely to get some excellence.

But I think you did bring out the important point that there might be a selectivity against innovation in that system, and I've brought that up at our previous hearings here. As I understand the model Mr. Poulin and Mr. Forsdyke presented, perhaps this is oversimplified, but basically you're saying give good researchers some more money and let them go on with their projects. I have two questions about that.

First of all, how then would you target those projects to areas of research that are in the best interest of the taxpayer, who's paying for this?

Second, we already have far greater volume of projects and, I assume, good researchers than there is money. So how would you then pick which researchers to fund in that manner?

The Chair: Dr. Forsdyke.

Mr. Donald Forsdyke: You say it's hyperbole that the process actively selects against excellence, and I don't think that's correct. I think it does actively select... that wasn't a loose phrase.

All of us know the sun rises in the morning. You don't need experiments or so much data to show the sun rises in the morning—it's a fact. Now, if you do any history—and I've done quite a study of our history of discovery—time and time again, when a great discovery is made, you ask, how did you come about this? Tell us the story. And very often—not every time, but in many cases—the story is one of overcoming great difficulties, of people going around with vast amounts of money, doing nothing, and these people struggling against the odds and gradually overcoming them. It's such a repeated story that we have to accept there's an element of truth in it.

Secondly, it's common sense again, if you have something really good, innovative and new, it's innovative and new because other people haven't yet thought about it. And that in itself means it's going to be quite difficult to communicate.

So there's no hyperbole there. The system really does select against excellence, I feel.

The Chair: Dr. Poulin.

Mr. Bryan Poulin: I'm going to take a little indirect attack at this one and say that—in business, for a minute—many studies that go out and survey all that's happening come out with an astounding result, and that is that the results are average.

If you want to look for excellence, you have to look for pockets of it. If you want to know how effective business is conducted, you go and look at effective businesses, those that have been innovative over the decades. You don't go look at the average businesses and take a poll of average opinion.

I think excellence and innovation are like seeds—they start out with seeds and they grow into something that looks quite phenomenal, but you're never able to tell if the seed is going to be a good one. That's why we need to hedge the bets.

I didn't come here to support Dr. Forsdyke; we are independent thinkers. But I'm more inclined to support him the more I listen to him. He's absolutely right. Albert Einstein would not be funded, in my opinion, under the peer review system. His ideas were too far out. Who would ever have believed that light, energy, and matter were related? Who would ever have believed in past history that the earth wasn't the centre of the universe? Nobody believed these things. When they were announced, the people who were good thinkers were thought to be crackpots by the establishment.

• 1025

As the honourable Mr. Bagnell said, we are not talking about ordinary people here. We're talking about funding people who have PhDs, who have spent their lifetimes following curiosity—not money, but curiosity, and an intention to make the world a better place. We are cutting people off from even a modicum of funding, when their life experience and passion demands they seek it, no matter how little we give them.

All we're saying is give a little bit of money to people who are very well qualified—and there are only about 10,000 scientists in Canada, anyway, so we're not talking a whole bunch of money here. If you look at $10,000 or $20,000 per scientist on average to get their ideas going, it's not a lot of money when you consider we're spending $100,000 times these 10,000 research scientists already. All we're saying is give them the equipment. It's like teaching without a classroom.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Bagnell.

Mr. Lastewka.

Mr. Walt Lastewka (St. Catharines, Lib.): Thank you very much. I'm going to apologize in advance for trying to make the situation simple.

We have a system of peer review to review projects, funding, and going forward. I call it a system. I want to make it very simple. Dr. Frise; I'm going along with your thinking. We should be reviewing it every five years, asking if we're going in the right direction or not—doing a continuous review. I take strong objection to people who are so strong on the peer review and are objecting that our committee is even looking at it. They should be looking at it themselves, evaluating themselves. So I want to make this very simple.

We have a system. A little bit of my engineering background says we should be reviewing it, sometimes even zero-basing it, to make sure we are getting the best of research, going above the bar, not below, and getting a return on our dollars for the long run, not the short run. I'd like to hear your remarks.

Mr. Peter Frise: Thank you. I don't disagree with anything you've said, sir. I think we do need a plan for a long-term innovation strategy for our country. I think that has been lacking in the past, and that is now under active development and so on. I think every program should be reviewed periodically to make sure it's meeting the aims that were set for it. And I think that's a key thought, that every program out there needs clear aims, and those aims need to be clearly communicated to the people who participate in the program to make sure it doesn't go off track.

Mr. Walt Lastewka: So I look at it with a simplistic view—I seem to get more done that way. We should do some research about ourselves and our system, get people from all sides, make it open and transparent so everybody can contribute, and search for the best practices in the world for doing what our system is supposed to do. Then put it into play for five years. And maybe because it's researched, it should be a little longer—I can buy that. But we should be, at least on an ongoing basis, looking at continuous review of our system of approving and making things happen.

Is that too simple?

Mr. Peter Frise: Not for me, sir.

The Chair: Dr. Poulin.

Mr. Bryan Poulin: I think it's spot on. It's exactly what we're trying to say. And in terms of simplicity, I believe we have to have a lot of words to sometimes get into profundity, and profundity is saying complex things in simple ways.

The Chair: Dr. Dohoo, do you wish to comment?

• 1030

Mr. Ian Dohoo: Yes. I'm in full agreement with the need for review. The specific issue we address is that there is a relatively new area of animal health research that has grown dramatically in this country in the last 20 years. Without that review process in place, we just don't have a look in.

The decisions about the allocation of funding are essentially made by people who are already in the system. Given that resources are already stretched very thin, it's not surprising that they don't want to look to new areas to fund. I can only speak personally from the animal health perspective, but I don't believe we're alone.

Cooper Langford, in a report to the ministers of education, identified this problem of areas that are currently not covered by the system being severely disadvantaged. Without the review process that you describe, it's very difficult to expand the system to incorporate new and developing areas.

The Chair: Dr. Forsdyke.

Mr. Donald Forsdyke: Simple, simple. Simple arguments have a great sales value.

I remember Clinton used to say—I'm allowed to mention Clinton, am I?—“It's the economy, stupid”. I mean, grab that and run with it, and he grabbed it and ran with it.

Everyone knows genes can go wrong, so let's have a genome project. Let's sequence the genome. This is wonderful; it has great sales value, and you get lots of money being poured into the genome project. Because various interests perceive that they can patent genes and make a lot of money out of this, commercial money flows into it and you get the great project going.

Earlier this year there was a great fanfare, a blowing of trumpets, and the human genome was sequenced. That required an enormous amount of money and resources. Meanwhile, there were a lot of people, like myself, who were trying to understand the genome.

Let's say you go out into Ottawa at nighttime and look at a building with 100 windows. You see that there's a light on in two of those windows. If someone says to you, “Where's the action going on in that building?”, you say, “It's in those two windows with the lights.” That's our genes. Genes are about 2% of the genome, and all our focus is on that 2%. In most of us, that describes the situation.

However, when you get a bit of flu or a virus infection, do you know what happens? Those two windows begin to flicker a little bit and the lights begin to come on in the other 98 windows. Many people—the genome people—say, “That's junk DNA; we'll forget about it.” People like me are trying to understand our DNA. We're saying, “Why is the light going on in these other windows in this skyscraper of the human genome?” These are the sorts of questions we're asking.

The genome project came along. They had technical skills and they did a magnificent job of sequencing the genome. When they finished the job, they had to publish it. So the sequence was just a mass of sequences they put in a database, and they wrote a paper about it. All they had to do in their paper was say, “This is the sequence, and these are the main sequence features of the human genome.” But they had used a lot of hype in order to get the money to do it. They got carried away with the hype and they began to write more on their papers than was required.

People like me and the greatest genomographer in the world, Giorgio Bernardi of Naples, immediately realized that this whole thing was up in arms. Bernardi has recently come out with a great paper that pulls their paper together completely. They just don't understand the limits in which they are working and their great ignorance.

Another person, the leader of the commercial genome project, even thought he'd cracked the genetic code, with the help of a major corporation, put a full-page advertisement in the Toronto Globe and Mail claiming to have cracked the genetic code. The genetic code was cracked in the sixties. Nobel prizes were awarded in 1968.

I wrote a letter to the Globe and Mail, which they published. You'd have thought then they would have pulled the advertisement from future issues. It appeared again in subsequent weeks, a full-page advertisement in the Globe and Mail claiming that the head of a large American corporation had cracked the genetic code.

This is double-talk; it's doublespeak. It's getting carried away with the momentum of the success of their sales pitch, which had allowed them to sequence the code. We have to try to avoid simplicity, simple arguments, because it's more complex than you think.

The Chair: Mr. Lastewka.

Mr. Walt Lastewka: I have no further questions. I'll stick to my theory.

The Chair: Okay. Thank you.

Ms. Torsney.

Ms. Paddy Torsney (Burlington, Lib.): I have just a couple of questions.

• 1035

Dr. Dohoo, you were talking about training the next generation of highly skilled professionals in this area. When you first said it in one of your answers, I was thinking you were suggesting that there was going to be a gap because there were currently professionals in this area. Is it really that it's a new area and there isn't going to be the requisite training and run-up to this new area, or is it already being done somewhere else? Has it been done in the past?

Mr. Ian Dohoo: This whole area of population-based and clinical-based research and the growth of epidemiology is really one that has grown dramatically over the last 25 years. There's been a tremendous growth in the number of professionals working in this area, particularly at the four veterinary colleges across Canada.

Because it's a new area, the future, in terms of the availability of professionals, is not a problem that we're facing in the next five years. Without access to many of these programs that fellowships are based upon, the Canada research chairs and so on, we're facing a great difficulty in attracting and filling positions for training now that are going to fill the positions that are needed in probably 10 or 15 years' time.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: In the United States, they fund this kind of research?

Mr. Ian Dohoo: It's an interesting situation. The United States Department of Agriculture has a peer-reviewed competitive research program that funds this type of research, certainly for the domestic livestock species. This area really expands beyond that. It includes companion animals and horses and so on. Those tend not to be very well funded, obviously, by departments of agriculture. That's one model.

There has been some discussion in Canada about the establishment of a comparable program through Agriculture Canada. That would be a viable solution, provided that utilization of that program also provided you access to these other things like Canada research chairs programs and so on.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: Is any other country funding this kind of research?

Mr. Ian Dohoo: Oh, yes. To a large degree, much of this work is funded by... I'm most familiar with the northern European countries. It's funded by federal agencies, often directly through animal health-related programs as opposed to general research programs such as NSERC would operate.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: Are they in response to the more obvious crisis?

Mr. Ian Dohoo: A few crises certainly help focus the mind on the need for funding in a certain area, but I don't think they're necessarily responses to crises. Some of the countries, particularly Scandinavian countries... Denmark does a great job. They have a huge swine industry, very important to the national economy. They've had a very strong research program in that area, which they fund jointly through the federal system, but also in collaboration with producer organizations.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: So if we wanted to recommend something in this area, we at least have some other models to look at.

Mr. Ian Dohoo: Yes, and a different model from corporations or broadening of the mandate. We're greatly heartened by the wonderful steps that took place when MRC was turned into CIHR. If you read the four pillars, really three of the four pillars that each institute is based on relate to population-based research. This relates to the understanding of disease in populations, the use of technologies and health systems. We need the same broadening of mindset to occur in connection with animal health, which falls under NSERC's mandate.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: Dr. Frise, you do research into a pretty important area of the Canadian economy, but it seems to perhaps not have captured the granting council's attention.

Dr. Dohoo mentioned that Denmark has a big swine industry and recognizes that it's important for research. We have a huge automotive industry, but so far it hasn't registered in terms of research dollars. Is part of the problem making sure that those people who are on peer review, who are on the granting councils, really reflect research into areas that are important to the Canadian economy?

Mr. Peter Frise: Well, it's obvious to me that the people making a decision have to understand the field they're making the decision in.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: Right.

• 1040

Mr. Peter Frise: But I think there's a little more to it than that. I think it's important that they understand the aims of the program they're making the decision for. Sometimes we may not be as effective at communicating the aims of the programs to the folks on the peer review committees.

Auto industry research in Canada has received very little attention over the years. I think that has now changed. The new network of centres of excellence in the automobile of the 21st century has now been founded and is beginning to operate, but I have to say it's pretty small money. The amount of money available for actual research and to support the development of research infrastructure for automotive projects is really rather small. The overall grant is about $5,778,000 per year, but that's spread across over 200 researchers in 28 universities in 7 provinces, so it's spread pretty thinly.

In contrast, the United States, which of course is a giant in almost every field of endeavour, probably spends something like a hundred times that. It's actually difficult to find the exact number. A more directly comparable program would be the British program called the foresight vehicle program, which spends roughly ten times that. Those are just the numbers I can quickly gather from the web. So I think we're a long way behind in some of these key industry sectors, and if we don't catch up very quickly we are in some peril of losing our position in those sectors. And they provide hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The Chair: Briefly, Ms. Torsney.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: Yes.

I take it you wouldn't support the proposal to give a minimum amount of money to all qualified researchers in an area.

Mr. Peter Frise: I would have some difficulty with that. I'd want to look at the particular amount of money being suggested for researchers. To give you an example of how universities function—and they all function this way around the world as far as I know—even something like a long-distance telephone call from a researcher externally has to be paid for out of some grant account. So if a faculty member in a university doesn't have any research funding at all, in effect they can't even make a long-distance telephone call; they can't send a long-distance fax without applying for some internal university funding, which is always very scarce and difficult to come by sometimes.

So I think the idea has some merit, but I'd want to look at the particulars of the program before I'd be prepared to support it wholeheartedly.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Ms. Torsney. I have to let members know that we are going to run out of time so I'm going to ask members to be a little more brief.

Mr. St. Denis and then Mr. Bergeron.

Mr. Brent St. Denis (Algoma—Manitoulin, Lib.): Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, gentlemen, for being here.

In the vein of our discussions certainly, but in a slightly different direction, I have two questions. The first has to do with the relationship between pure science and applied science, and secondly, getting younger researchers into the system.

On the first subject, if we use the notion that we'd see the benefits of research in relation to applied technology in the near term, versus pure research, for which the benefits may not be seen for quite some time, and maybe not for generations, how does the current system ensure that we have a good balance between the application of research in consumer products and better and safer products, but also that there's a certain amount of pure science being done for which there is no deemed immediate benefit? Is there any way through the whole system, either as it exists now or as it might be changed, where some notion of the balance can be maintained?

Mr. Peter Frise: Are you asking me, sir?

Mr. Brent St. Denis: Actually, any of you.

I'll let the chair decide.

The Chair: Dr. Frise.

Mr. Peter Frise: Essentially, and very briefly, the balance among various fields is essentially built into the system by the allocation of funding to the various NSERC grant review committees, in the NSERC sphere of influence at least. So I'm a mechanical engineer. I apply for grants to the mechanical engineering grant selection committee, and they have a certain overall budget for all the mechanical engineering work in Canada. That allocation is, I believe, set by the NSERC council. Periodically, they revisit that allocation of funding to see if it would be worthwhile to shift money from one field to another.

• 1045

I think the question of the balance between applied and pure research is a very important question, and one that would require a good deal of study to come up with a definitive answer on. But that's how the system works at present.

The Chair: Dr. Forsdyke.

Mr. Donald Forsdyke: If you want to have research results applied, you have to have a good working relationship between academia and industry. But the key is balance, and that was your word, “balance”.

Someone else some time ago said, “On tap but not on top”. Unfortunately, in Canada, it's gotten out of balance because the commercial influences, the industrial elements, particularly in my area related to medical research, have gotten on top. If we wish to appoint a new member of our department—this is the biochemistry department of a university—the first thing we ask is not how good is he or she at doing their research, but “Are they fundable?” When we ask if they are fundable, we usually mean, “Can they spin a line to a major pharmaceutical company that will give them backing so that they can apply and get backing funds to get some project?” You have this linkage between applying for a grant and getting an industrial sponsor. You've made this so dominant that the pharmaceutical companies and commercial interests have gotten on top. So Canada is out of balance.

Mr. Brent St. Denis: Supplementary to that, if I were to try to find out where in the system the most effect on the balance is found, it is or is not at the peer review level? I'm imagining that if I'm in the peer review system and I am, among my cohorts, more influenced on the applied side, then the outcomes will be more on the applied side. There's no policy somewhere that says 20%, or 10%, or 50% of granted dollars have to be for pure versus applied.

The Chair: I have several who want to answer.

Dr. Dohoo.

Mr. Ian Dohoo: I think that's absolutely right. One of the issues with the system is that by and large decisions are made by the grant selection committees, which reflect the people and the viewpoints that are currently being funded. It goes back to Mr. Lastewka's suggestion for periodic review of the entire system to ensure that these sorts of areas that Canada needs funded are being funded, first, and that the balance—and everybody recognized the need for that balance—is appropriate.

The Chair: Dr. Frise.

Mr. Peter Frise: Thank you.

Yes, that is correct in my view. But I think it's important to understand that the allocation between pure and applied research is not so much directed, in my view at least. It's not so much built into the peer review system; it's built into the various programs. There are various programs that I think all three of the granting councils have—certainly NSERC has and the CFI, in fact—where external industrial funding is required to obtain any grant funds at all, and there are other programs where such external industry funding is not required. That's really where the industry/non-industry balance and the effort comes from.

In answering the earlier question, I thought you were referring to how the various disciplines balance out. That is, as I said, in the allocation of funding to each grant selection committee. So Dr. Dohoo applies to a different grant selection committee than the one I apply to, and they have separate budgets. Once they've spent their budget, that's it.

The Chair: Dr. Poulin.

Mr. Bryan Poulin: I think we can lose sight of some things here. I would argue, and my colleague, Dr. Gordon, has argued, for more grant money than the best that industry practice normally gives to all of their researchers. But surely we should be giving a modicum to every researcher who is qualified, and I mean who is trained and active in research, not somebody who doesn't normally do research.

I'll draw one example, the 3M Corporation, and I'll read this out. It is straight from their documentation and is available in our article, which I'll give you a copy of so you can reproduce it.

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On grant money at 3M Corporation:

Money and time are required for innovation. Technical people

—and that includes their scientists—

can use the grant to pay for temporary labour to do some of their existing work while they spend more of their time developing [new ideas].

We in the research community are not even doing that, and that is really an indictment against the agencies.

I'll get back to the second point, and I'll keep this absolutely brief. We need to study the outcomes and the impacts of the previous system that's been going on for decades. All the data is available. I have applied, and we are hoping to work through the NCIC, which has opened their database to us. We're hoping that CIHR will later do the same and have a statistician, a biomedical researcher, an organizational researcher—myself—and a small team, which is going to cost very little, go in and do a scientific analysis of data that's available, so we are not left with ungrounded opinion, as heartfelt as it is.

The Chair: Very briefly, Mr. St. Denis.

Mr. Brent St. Denis: My second question is on the next generation—the younger researchers. Is there or is there not a bias against new entrants to the system, either in the current system or as it might be proposed?

Would it make sense to sort of say 10% is going to be put aside for young researchers making their first applications, as long as they meet a basic bar of qualification? Would we just put their names in a hat? Just like trying to get new people onto a board of directors, are there ways to get new people into the system, notwithstanding that we are stretching scarce dollars?

The Chair: Dr. Frise and then Dr. Poulin.

Mr. Peter Frise: Thank you.

I would say that such a bias for new young researchers does exist.

Mr. Brent St. Denis: Is it in favour of them?

Mr. Peter Frise: Yes, and that's quite clearly stated in NSERC reviews.

Different fields have different practices, but in my field it's quite well understood that a new, young researcher stands a better chance of getting a grant than a more senior researcher. I have no problem with that; in fact, I think that is absolutely the correct way to go.

I wouldn't want my point misunderstood from my statement. I'm not so much concerned about people who are now faculty members, although the pressure is pretty severe on all of us now. I'm not whining, but that's just how it is. It's very tough on the younger people, who are raising families and so on.

I'm more concerned about the fact that we are not attracting the best people into our PhD programs. PhD stipends, or salaries if you like, are so uncompetitive in my field compared to industrial salaries that it's absolutely economically a disaster to do graduate studies. It's very hard. It's hard to get someone to do an MA, which takes about 15 to 20 months, but you can quite often get good people to do that. It's very difficult to stick around for a PhD, which takes three or four years. You lose the price of a house paid off. People look at that and say “Why would I do that? Why would I make between $20,000 and $30,000 a year for four years instead of making $50,000 to $70,000 a year in industry? Why would I do that?”

Frankly, a lot of the faculty members who educated me when I was an undergraduate student were educated in Great Britain. Their PhD work was supported at largely the same level as an industrial salary, because I think that country saw those people as absolutely critical to the future economic and social well-being of their nation. I find it discouraging that we haven't managed to do that.

I talked to a couple of my colleagues at different universities across Canada before coming here, and they told me the best thing we could do was simply greatly increase the value of stipends for PhD students.

The Chair: Dr. Poulin.

Mr. Bryan Poulin: I think we're getting away from the facts. I'll just draw one clear example.

CIHR has increased their budget from just over $300 million to $500 million. They are now asking for researchers to write in and increase their budget to $1 billion. What we're talking about here is taking some of the increase the CIHR would have, as one example, and giving some funding to all qualified researchers—and that is not very costly. Qualified researchers are research-active people. They're not people who are not research-active.

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Before we get into this and what the costs are—the costs are quite nominal—and as far as putting an argument to my colleague, Dr. Frise, is concerned, I would have this to say. People in universities who are attracted to research are attracted because they are curiosity driven; they are not primarily financially driven. All we need is a modicum of support for these people, and they will stay and be attracted.

But what can I tell a graduate student, “Come here and take a chance”? Or “You have a better chance at NSERC if you're a new researcher”—not a good chance, a better chance—“to receive some funding”? That's simply not good enough, because you haven't given that person an opportunity to pursue his or her curiosity. And all breakthroughs in this century have been by curiosity-driven people, not financially driven people.

The Chair: I'm going to go to Dr. Dohoo and then Dr. Forsdyke.

Dr. Dohoo.

Mr. Ian Dohoo: I'd just like to reiterate what Dr. Frise said. While most of us in academia are curiosity driven, the financial problem of recruiting graduate students is certainly serious for us in animal health. When I did my PhD I received a stipend that was probably—I was funded through the Medical Research Council—about 70% or 75% of my value in the marketplace—what I could have gotten outside the university. We now ask graduate students to survive on about 30% of what they could capture in the marketplace, and it's extremely difficult for us to get Canadians.

The Chair: Dr. Forsdyke.

Mr. Donald Forsdyke: I think it's not just money. The young people are very enthusiastic. They're prepared to live on a pittance; it's amazing how some of them do manage. But I think a lot of them are very averse to the culture they're entering.

This culture has transformed over the last few decades. About 40 years ago, when I began research, the word “aggressive”, for example, was frowned upon. You didn't do anything aggressively. Now, you “aggressively” pursue your goals—and “aggressive”, if you've done any boxing, means you take a swing. You usually tend to take risks. This means there has been a tendency towards a definite survival value if you're prepared to take risks. Those who are prepared to push the normal ethical and moral constraints on their actions to—and sometimes beyond—the legal limit have sometimes done very well in the Darwinian system we have created.

We've created a culture of risk-taking, and every time we apply the peer review gate the way it's set up at present, we slake off a selection of people; we remove certain people from the system, and the gate comes down again. Gradually, over the decades, there's been a demographic shift in the research community—the type of person who is carrying out research—and this sometimes has very bizarre consequences. We end up, if you think of the Canadian landscape, with a landscape of funding that might be like this, and then you have a landscape of ideas which is out of sync with the funding landscape. You get all sorts of problems here. If the funding won't go to the ideas, then the ideas have to go to the funding.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Forsdyke.

I'm going to go very briefly to Mr. Bergeron, because we're already out of time.

Mr. Bergeron.

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Poulin, it was my impression that your response to my final question further reinforced the view whereby the current system creates distortions which adversely affect a number of eminent researchers and valuable projects. You are calling for a review of the current system but in the meantime, you favour the wider distribution of grant funds.

My question is quite simple. What other options do you feel we have other than to dilute or spread around the grant funds that are awarded to research projects which otherwise would not go ahead because of inadequate funding?

[English]

The Chair: Dr. Poulin.

Mr. Bryan Poulin: I don't believe in practical terms that is the result at all. We are talking about somewhere between 15% and 30% of the funding being more widely spread, and the people who would be receiving this funding would be the people who would be going on to the bigger projects in any case. So there is some overlap; there's also some more inclusion. What we would be doing is imposing more rigour at the later stages for people who are already happy to go ahead in the competitive system.

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I don't think in principle we're even invalidating their arguments. All we're saying is that the good ideas in this century have been followed through by people who tend to be mavericks, and we are cutting off our own future by denying a modicum of research for these curiosity driven-people.

Edwin Land, the second most patented person in the world, has also made this point. He got out of academia to follow his own curiosity. He made the point that we are imagination driven and all we need is a little support. 3M has been the leading corporation by applying these principles.

We're saying until we have the research done to show which hypothesis unequivocally has more merit, we should hedge our bets—this is done in any area—and we'd hedge our bets by including more people.

The Chair: Is that it? C'est fini?

I want to thank the witnesses for being here today, and I want to apologize for not being able to continue this conversations or this dialogue. I would like to go further into your opening comments, Dr. Dohoo, because I think it extends to other areas as well where you have these two very different types of research being conducted. There's a corporation in my area, DaimlerChrysler, that would agree very much with you that the people on the panel were not experts in the type of research described—very distinct from animal health, automotive—and that was part of the problem. I think we have to figure out ways to fix these problems so that you receive a fair and an adequate hearing.

As well, I would appreciate some views in writing on an appeal process. We didn't have a chance to talk much about that. The way the system is set up right now, there doesn't seem to be an opportunity, in my opinion, for an adequate appeal, or even maybe for partial funding. Dr. Forsdyke put forward an interesting proposal we will obviously look more into.

This committee intends to travel to both the United States and to countries in Europe to look at what they are doing, to try to understand where Canada is meeting or not meeting its goals.

Again, I want to thank you for your very valuable insight into the peer review process and for your willingness to appear here today. Others are very afraid to appear because of the powers that be in the CFI and the other granting councils. I think it's really detrimental—and really very unfortunate—that we can't even have the conversation we need to have.

For the record, I want to also note that the committee is examining the entire process, both the merits and the shortcomings. I think it's something, as Mr. Lastewka said, we need to do: we need to have this review.

To that effect I want to qualify any comments that may have been inadvertently made about specific individuals earlier on in the process. The issues today are about the process and not about the individuals. I know sometimes it's hard to describe without referring to a specific individual. We want to qualify this, because I know there was no intention for there to be any harm to any individuals.

Thank you very much for being here, thank you for enduring our change of rooms, and we look forward to meeting with you again in the future.

Thank you very much.