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Results: 1 - 15 of 23
Jason Nickerson
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Jason Nickerson
2021-05-28 14:08
Hello. Thank you for having us here today.
We're going to speak about two issues that are part of the committee's study from the perspective of our organization, which provides medical assistance to people affected by crises in more than 70 countries around the world.
First, Canada should support the TRIPS waiver. The waiver is not a complete solution to scaling up and diversifying COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing to address the supply shortages, but supporting the waiver quickly clears space and removes legal barriers to then focus on the many other barriers. We emphasize that any waiver must encompass not only vaccines, but other tools like therapeutic drugs and diagnostics and medical devices such as ventilators, as well as the components and equipment needed to make vaccines.
Canada's position during discussions around the TRIPS waiver has been one of indecision—never formally rejecting it, while repeatedly raising alternatives that have failed in the past.
One such alternative raised is the TRIPS article 31 bis mechanism, which is operationalized by Canada's access to medicines regime, or CAMR. It is our position that Canada should follow through on its own claims of CAMR's effectiveness by taking the necessary first step of adding COVID-19 vaccines and drugs to schedule 1 of the Patent Act. While Doctors Without Borders does not believe that TRIPS article 31 bis or CAMR are effective tools at the best of times, let alone sufficient in this pandemic, Canada's failure to even list these items in schedule 1 means that Canada is the single greatest roadblock to utilizing the very tools it has promoted at the WTO.
The second issue we would like to discuss is domestic production. MSF supports increased domestic production, but it must be done correctly. If Canada's approach to scaling up biomanufacturing in this country is to provide financial support to pharmaceutical companies to build factories here, this funding must come with guarantees of affordable access to the final products, both for Canada and for the rest of the world. This is just common sense. If the public is paying to develop and manufacture medicines, we should all be able to access them at fair prices. To this end, Canada must also be transparent about the terms of all such deals.
Another key question is what to do between pandemics with the public manufacturing capacity that Canada is building. New quality-assured manufacturing capacity that has been initiated for the purposes of producing COVID-19 vaccines should not be shut down or sold off to private interests after the pandemic fades. Rather, Canada should use this capacity to address other important global health issues. Producing a range of products keeps facilities operating and Canada's skills sharp. After all, it's not clear what the next pandemic will be, and the world needs a diversity of manufacturing capacities.
Canada has world-class researchers. Where it falls short is in end-to-end development to get innovations out of labs and to patients. Products that are vital for global health but have limited commercial appeal have no real pathway to approval.
Take the Canadian-invented Ebola vaccine, discovered by scientists at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. After discovering it, Canada signed a deal to license it to an American company. This ultimately led to the vaccine languishing on a shelf for years. This meant that this effective vaccine was not ready in time for the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak. To be blunt, this cost lives.
Canada has other promising experimental vaccines, such as the ones for Lassa fever and Marburg virus, which have faced similar challenges. End-to-end production from lab bench to patient bedside ought to be part of our biomanufacturing strategy.
Our overarching message here is that there are many important diseases that are essentially market failures: They are not profitable enough to attract investment from private pharmaceutical companies, yet they represent significant public health threats. Ebola, Lassa fever, Marburg and, prior to this pandemic, coronaviruses are all examples.
There are also many important drugs and vaccines that already exist and are regularly in shortage or hard to obtain. Diphtheria antitoxin, the product Connaught Labs was founded to produce, is now almost impossible to procure worldwide. We know this first-hand because when we were responding to simultaneous diphtheria outbreaks in Yemen, Bangladesh and Venezuela in 2017, we quickly realized how few options existed. The same is true for many antibiotics and other low-profit medicines.
A robust biomanufacturing strategy that is guided by public health needs—and not the pursuit of profits—is what needs to guide Canada's biomanufacturing strategy, which ought to be linked to a research and development strategy—
Hari Suthan Subramaniam
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Hari Suthan Subramaniam
2021-05-10 11:27
Thank you so much, Madam Chair, members of the committee and my colleagues from industry. It's a great honour to be here to talk about how we may be able to take part and inform the discussion on Canada's export of environmental and clean technologies on goods and services.
I'll take a bit of a departure from my colleagues. I think I'm one of the only software companies to talk about software exports and what they mean.
My name is Hari Subramaniam, as Madam Chair has introduced me. I head up strategic growth and global sales for Opus One Solutions. We believe we are probably a good fit as a litmus test or a canary in the coal mine with respect to how we've been able to garner help from domestic support, from the government's policies and regulations, while at the same time we can give you a sense of the competitive landscape that we and other colleagues in the sector face.
As a quick snapshot, Opus One was Canadian-founded. We have two offices, Richmond Hill in Toronto and downtown Toronto. Hopefully, we will be moving out for more talent across the country. Opus One is one of the few companies that has been named four times to the top 100 clean-tech companies globally. We share that honour with CarbonCure in Nova Scotia.
We started to build our pilot technology in about 2016, really moving to commercialization in 2019-20. We have grown about 500% in employment, hitting well past about a hundred this year, and we've actually grown during COVID, or the global pandemic. That's the uniqueness of the sector that we're in. Overall on revenues we're at about 300% since about 2016, and we're one of the few leading companies from a software perspective to facilitate energy transition. Our customers tend to be utilities, whether they're privately owned or government-owned.
I should probably provide you with a sense of how we segment our customers and how we serve from Canada internationally.
One of our other unique attributes is that we've actually grown into about six to seven countries between 2020 and 2021. We've actually gone international and global during the global pandemic, and 90% of our staff are Canadian-based.
First, I'd love to thank the committee and the governments writ large for the policy framework and the funding associated that have really helped to drive-start our start-up nation, giving birth to companies like ours. We just happen to be in the clean-tech sector. One of the stats that I do not have, and I'm not sure if it's robustly there, is the split between hardware from clean tech; money that leaves us, whether it be renewable developers that are Canadian or are elsewhere; software; and then services in clean tech as an export quantity.
From a software perspective, I would think Canada is one of the biggest exporters of clean-technology software globally. How do we help that sector? That's probably why I'm here to share my thoughts.
I'll give a shout-out to a Canadian company that is a little less known, but pretty big here actually, called CGI out of Montreal. They're one of the largest clean-technology services firms globally. I think there's a lot of diamonds in the rough that perhaps through this process we can unearth.
I'll get to the two questions that, I think, were posed. One is, what is going well? I think we've built a great ecosystem for start-ups: the federal agencies, the incubators. We have a wonderful job done with the trade commissioners engaging in a meaningful but also a metric-driven manner to help Canadian companies export abroad. I think from ISED to SDTC to NRCan, they've done a fantastic job with IRAP in terms of how to construct funding or leveraging to help companies grow. I think EDC and BDC have done a good job from a venture cap perspective. I'll give credit to Diana Cartwright from the trade commission for really shaping that organization. We have definitely been blessed and have benefited from that.
There's some great funding with collaboration, the Canadian-Indian industrial partnership, the Canada-U.K. funding in terms of helping Canadian companies enter the market by collaborating with one of their own. I think they've been a big benefit. I would like to commend Amanda Wilson and Cynthia Handler,from the departmental side, for really leading that and paying attention to companies like ours and our growth.
A lot of MOUs that have been signed by the government in innovation have actually helped us, and the same thing with FedDev in terms of scaled and continued growth. However, having said all of that, which has built the ecosystem, one of the things I'd like to share is that I think we've done a great job on start-ups, but I think we haven't really looked holistically at the scale-up of companies. I think there are gaps in the scale-up aspect.
Opus One Solutions is no longer a start-up. We're a scale-up, so where do we go?
There are a couple of things to point out. Every jurisdiction in the world is revolving around clean tech. They want a sector to be grown there. They want taxes to be paid to their jurisdiction. What I would urge departments in the government to do is to actually take a competitive benchmarking. I personally don't think we do that well as a nation.
What I mean by that is that Germany and the U.K. are really pushing in tandem with companies in their jurisdictions to move globally—more, I would say, than we are. In terms of whether it be financing or giving funding to enter the market to do a pilot, I think that's critical for a lot of technologies. The majority of customers for our products or even my colleagues' prefer to have a case study or someone who has bought their product and tested it in their local market rather than having that done in a Toronto, Halifax or Vancouver. It doesn't carry as much weight. Everyone wants to know if you've done it in Illinois or Brazil, and so on and so forth. I think that's a big gap. That's missing.
The other one is in terms of financing or funding as you move towards profitability. I think most of EDC and our venture capital, whether they're government-backed or independent, have a tendency to try to want to deal, so we'd rarely invest in companies that have reached a valuation of $50 million-plus. We are one of the few companies that see, from a Canadian perspective, that there are not enough folks willing to bet on our own companies' growth because our valuation has gone up.
It's very much on start-up, not on scale-up. There we look at financing from other investors, which generally means that over time we will stop being a CCPC. I think that's something we should focus on. How do you ensure that there are more companies that continue to be CCPCs, that continue to apply for IP in Canada and are as Canadian as possible?
The other attribute I'd say that can be improved on is MOUs. Trade relationships are critical. As my colleague said, with buy America and buy Europe, how do we continue as a trading nation be in those discussions and help companies? There's also the fact that, in most of our agreements, we have a reliance on joint research and development. I think we should be cautious in pushing that. As a private entity, I would like to do customization of research to sell my product into a market of choice. I do not want to be beholden to doing research with a third party if there's an agreement or funding attached to that. I think uncoupling some of that would help us move into markets faster.
One of the other things I would also urge the committee to look at is that the goal of the Paris accord is a good one, but if we are to drive clean-tech companies abroad, I would rather that, as a nation, we would have objectives and goals that are audacious. An example of that would be that some of our provinces were chasing solar manufacturing or renewable manufacturing about a decade ago, 15 years after Germany had defined it. Germany defined it because they had an objective or a goal well before anybody else did, and by virtue of that, entrepreneurs came to that segment.
The U.K. and France, for example, have said they will not have a single combustion vehicle on their road by 2050. It's an audacious goal. What it means is that they're starting to think about what new industries have to be born to serve such a market if they're serious about that goal. I would urge Canadians and Canada to have an objective that we're driving towards.
I shall not talk more about buy America, it is of concern for us, especially with cybersecurity and security as an issue as well. I think it was covered by some of my colleagues. Really, what I would ask is to rethink some of our government funding and protocols to play more holistic role in terms of enhancing our growth in exports and paying taxes to Canada and employment in Canada.
Thank you.
View Sukh Dhaliwal Profile
Lib. (BC)
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I want to thank all the presenters for the leadership their companies have shown when it comes to clean technology and services. My first question will go to Mr. Subramaniam.
Mr. Subramaniam, you mentioned that you are going to expand across Canada. British Columbia has beautiful weather and wonderful people, and more important when it comes to environment technologies, it is a leader in those technologies. We have LNG, Ballard and many more to come.
How might you take advantage of what British Columbia has to offer? Do you see prospects for your company here?
Hari Suthan Subramaniam
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Hari Suthan Subramaniam
2021-05-10 11:43
Thank you, Mr. Dhaliwal.
From a software perspective, we're a people-based business so talent is one of our biggest drivers. If I may speak openly and honestly, Toronto is a lovely city, but its growth in software and talent has ensured—in a good way, I think, for the federation—that we look at the talent pool across the federation. Vancouver is pretty good from a competitiveness perspective but also with respect to the talent pools coming out of universities and coming into the country through immigration.
We're looking at Vancouver but we're also looking at Prince Rupert and Victoria, while also looking at eastern Canada and Alberta as a talent base from a software perspective. Given the pandemic that has driven us to a virtual environment, the beautiful thing about Canadian companies like ours is that we can go to our own nation to find the best talent, irrespective of province or physical location.
Hari Suthan Subramaniam
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Hari Suthan Subramaniam
2021-05-10 12:02
I would say a couple of things. One is to have a bit more holistic look from inside the government as we engage with companies, again focusing on more scale-up. Can the hand of government come in broadly to help our companies that are starting to scale up to move internationally?
One thing I would re-echo, which I think my colleagues would share, is the ability to look at funding and financing as a way to help companies enter a market. The trade commissioner service and the others are fantastic at making their connections and the networks, and we can definitely drive to get the deals ourselves, but what makes it easier is if you come together and say, “Let us ensure that we get into that market”. We find that our European colleagues are doing a much better job from a government perspective in really pushing their companies to enter such markets.
We've done a great job, but that doesn't mean we can sit on our laurels. I will say we need to competitively benchmark what others are doing and ensure that we do the same amount of support for our companies so we can be leaders globally, while at the same time—a couple of my colleagues shared this—we look at and create a domestic market.
There is a little bit of a mismatch, I would say, Madam Ashton, in that we look at domestic policy and domestic funding as being a bit aloof from helping companies to go international. The Americans, as we talked about, are linking it together. I'm not saying we need a buy Canada framework, but there are different avenues by which we can ensure Canadian companies do prosper while keeping trade regulations open for international companies to compete with us at home.
View Ziad Aboultaif Profile
CPC (AB)
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thanks to the witnesses. We have four companies in front of us. It seems they're mostly net exporters.
I believe that, if you can sell your product domestically, you should be able to sell it internationally, and it takes both the private sector and the government to be able to set the competitive benchmark, as Mr. Subramaniam has mentioned.
I'm interested in knowing what the government can do to help on a scale-up, first of all. On start-ups we could probably do okay, but a scale-up is a different game altogether.
Second, it is common knowledge that to become competitive, on the government side, you need less red tape. You need a better taxation policy. You need better programs in order to be able to upgrade when you need it for your equipment and your ability, so, Mr. Subramaniam, what are we lacking in order to be able to set the competitive benchmark?
Hari Suthan Subramaniam
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Hari Suthan Subramaniam
2021-05-10 12:06
First would be a competitive benchmark from government, policy to policy. I know it's ever-evolving, but especially if we look at post-COVID, apart from stimulus, what are each of the countries doing to help their companies in the sector grow? That's one benchmark.
The second benchmark is around financing. I know there's a rebirth of the Canadian Commercial Corporation, which looks at how to get our companies very close to governments that are spending. That should be benchmarked in terms of federal government instruments, whether it be through their own bank, like EDC-BDC, or leveraged companies. How do we benchmark that against other competitors, the export development bank type of competitors?
I'm looking at both of them.
The third thing that is really hard to benchmark, which you're alluding to, is around our own culture of innovation as a nation. We are, if I may say so, a nation of cruise control. We like what we have, so why disturb it when things are going so well? Unfortunately, with the global energy transition, some of us have been in this sector for a couple of decades waiting for what we have seen happen today. I'll be honest. It's actually moving at a much faster pace than I thought, whether it be big companies or small companies, but also with the amount of capital that is being unleashed in terms of energy transition and decarbonization.
Therefore, this is the question for a nation like Canada and members of Parliament like yourselves: If the wave is already here, how do we ensure that we build the right surfboard for our companies and our people and then actually ride that wave all the way through? It's not going to be a blip. We think it's going to be at least the next 25 years.
Competitive benchmarks are one thing. Working together is another thing. What I would say to you as members of Parliament is that Germany has employed this through multiple government transitions. All the parties have always agreed on what the core thing is for economic development and have stuck to it. That would be one of my asks. On the key fundamentals, if it is going to be greenhouse gases and climate change, can we all align to ensure that there's a consistent wave forward so that we can crest this from a company perspective, but also a people perspective?
View Randeep Sarai Profile
Lib. (BC)
Thank you.
Mr. Subramanian, you have said that EDC and BDC have helped foster growth in clean tech, and scaling up is a big challenge.
Can you give us some suggestions? How have EDC and BDC helped, and how can they help further to scale up Canadian businesses in the context of—
Hari Suthan Subramaniam
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Hari Suthan Subramaniam
2021-05-10 12:15
Yes, I think it's twofold. One would be that I think there is extra financing available, but ultimately they are a bank. I think, moving forward, what would be a great discourse is the flexibility that BDC and EDC should offer that other traditional commercial banks wouldn't. I think that's one way.
Second is venture capital. They are both still looking at a small start-up style seed funding. I think there is a little bit of hesitation in terms of betting on, let's say, Canadian companies that are x percentage and above, so I think they should be bold. They should bet on our companies that are going to hit $100 million.
View Richard Martel Profile
CPC (QC)
Thank you, Madam Chair.
My thanks to the witnesses who are with us today.
Traceability is very important. We are well aware of that and we would like it to be a little more robust.
My question goes to the two witnesses from my region.
In your opinion, is it because of CUSMA that $6 billion in investments in Quebec are compromised?
Donat Pearson
View Donat Pearson Profile
Donat Pearson
2020-02-25 15:47
In part. Rio Tinto is waiting to see whether it will be possible to open the market and to take advantage of the increase anticipated in the coming years. When it comes to increasing primary production in Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean, the employer is quite guarded about whether the impact will be limited, or whether it is because of the fear of what is often called the commitment to foreign markets.
View Chris Lewis Profile
CPC (ON)
View Chris Lewis Profile
2020-02-25 17:52
Further on, it states that you are expanding and trying to find new markets in the United States. Can you describe a few examples of those new markets?
Todd Stafford
View Todd Stafford Profile
Todd Stafford
2020-02-25 17:52
Well, we make industrial and commercial cables. We do not make residential cables. Obviously, commercial construction in the metropolitan areas is very strong. We've established seven warehouses in the U.S. that we ship to customers from, covering mostly the eastern seaboard down into Texas, because freight is a big issue for large cables. We are slowly expanding into the Midwest, into the oilfields of the Dakotas. We make a lot of industrial cables for mining. There's a good mining market in Nevada.
Those are all opportunities for us.
View Chris Lewis Profile
CPC (ON)
View Chris Lewis Profile
2020-02-25 17:53
Are there any concerns and/or fears that the new CUSMA—or the new NAFTA, if you will—will impact the ability of companies such as yours to find new markets either in the U.S. or abroad? Is there any concern?
Todd Stafford
View Todd Stafford Profile
Todd Stafford
2020-02-25 17:53
Our only concern is that it's an opportunity for us if Canada participates as an equal partner, but Mexico is an untapped market for us.
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