Thank you very much, Madam Chair and the committee members, for this opportunity to be in front of this committee. In addition to being vice-president of research at the University of Saskatchewan—a 117-year-old institute of higher learning and research enterprise—I serve as professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Saskatchewan.

I had the privilege of being a member of the advisory panel on the federal research support system, which was commonly called the Bouchard panel, and that was the panel that did the review and submitted a report to the Government of Canada in 2023.

Today, I appear in front of this committee as a representative of the University of Saskatchewan, although I will refer to the findings of the Bouchard panel report in my testimony and during the discussion. Before I talk about the capstone organization that is being proposed to be set up in the country, I want to make a couple of comments on the report itself.

Since the report was submitted, the Government of Canada has taken a number of actions on the report, and I thank the government for doing that. The first and foremost is the investment in funding graduate student support and also the post-doctoral fellow support. As we know, the lifeline of any innovation system is the young talent that we grow domestically and also the top talent that comes from around the globe to make Canada their home. They will not come to Canada if we do not have a well-funded program to support them.

In addition, the Government of Canada also made a commitment to grow the funding for the tri-councils in our country so that our investigators can continue to get the best grant support to do the type of science that they do.

The last point I will make is because I am at the University of Saskatchewan, which is home to two of Canada's largest research facilities, the first of them being the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, VIDO, which did a commendable job during the pandemic in protecting the health of Canadians; and the Canadian Light Source, which is Canada's only synchrotron located in Saskatoon. I appreciate the steps that the Government of Canada is taking to create the major research facilities framework to provide sustained funding to some of our largest and most globally recognized research facilities in our country. Still, we have lots of work to do. We know Canada suffers from innovation gap, productivity gap, in comparison to our peer G7 group countries or the OECD countries when we measure ourselves against them.

The proposal to create a capstone organization is in play to bridge some of those gaps by creating very cohesive coordination and integration among multiple components of Canada's research and innovation system. For example, the capstone organization could itself create a better coordination among the tri-councils and other players in the innovation system, such as the Mitacs and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

However, I also want to create a caution here that we must continue to support, protect, preserve and enhance the excellent research funding mechanisms that have been created by NSERC, SSHRC, and Canadian Institutes of Health Research to support globally recognized research programs in our country.

We also need to pay attention to the colleges and the polytechnics that exist across our country. We know that the colleges, even though they are small, are deeply connected to the needs of the communities locally and have great capacity to be part of the innovation system to support small and medium enterprises in small towns and villages across the country. Hopefully, the capstone organization, once established, will try to bring these components—small universities, colleges and polytechnics—into Canada's innovation agenda.

The last point that we generally heard across the system is that international bodies and the government sometimes do not know on which door to knock when they come looking for Canada's participation in large-scale, mission-driven interdisciplinary research with global impact. Creating a capstone organization will allow Canadian scientists and the stellar work they do to be part of the global story and bring more recognition to our country.

In closing, I believe the time has come to evolve and adapt by creating a capstone organization so that the Canadian research and innovation system can keep pace with our peer global economies in the G7 or the G20 countries.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.