E. Richard Gold is a Distinguished James McGill Professor at McGill University’s Faculty of Law, Faculty of Medicines and Health Sciences and the Bieler School of the Environment. He is also the chief policy and partnerships officer at Conscience, a non-profit building an open science drug discovery network.

Canadian research funding is failing to achieve our social, health and economic goals. Universities and colleges continue to produce world-class research, but that research too often yields no new product or service or is commercialized by foreign firms that sell it back to us at a profit. The result is dependence on the United States and slower growth.

The U.S. system relies on deep private capital markets, significant public programs supporting innovation and vast domestic demand – none of which Canada can replicate. To fix this, Canada must stop copying U.S. policies developed under circumstances of abundance and instead leverage its scarcer assets strategically.

Canada invests just $11.33-billion federally and provincially in research annually, or 1.8 per cent of GDP – well below OECD and EU averages and significantly less than U.S. federal R&D spending of $195.7-billion (3.45 per cent of GDP).

The situation is worse........

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