By focussing on innovation, Canada’s R&D policies have had much more success than initiatives in Europe, where national governments have concentrated on manufacturing and other strictly economic activities.
With some notable exceptions, researcher John de la Mothe points out, those European efforts turned out to be largely unrealistic and impractical. Canada, on the other hand, has managed to create research clusters of significant strength in different parts of the country.
As the University’s Canada Research Chair in Innovation Strategy, de la Mothe has carefully studied the policies that Canada has put in place to cultivate economic diversity and dynamic new enterprises.
Working closely with researchers in law, engineering, and science, he has taken part in a formal comparison of science and technology policy in 10 countries with small- or medium-size economies like Canada’s.
De la Mothe shared some of his insights at a symposium during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advance of Science (AAAS), held in February in Washington, D.C.
With an economy and educational system that became highly industrialized only after World War Two, de la Mothe noted, Canada did not begin discussing science and technology policy until it was embraced by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in the 1980s. At that time, it became clear that Canada was not supporting research and development initiatives to the same degree as other countries. The government then brought in matching grant programs to leverage private sector money into strategic technology areas and make business more of a partner in R&D, de la Mothe said.
By the 1990s, Canadian policies in this sphere had become even more ambitious, with the launch of national Networks of Centres of Excellence, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the transformation of the Medical Research Council into the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
In spite of these achievements, he added, some Canadian politicians continue to look to the traditional might of the country’s resource economy. De la Mothe offered the example of finance minister Ralph Goodale, who recently told the Toronto Board of Trade about his preference for the forest industry over the country’s high tech sector.
