Alan Bernstein, O.C., PhD, FRSC, is president emeritus of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), distinguished fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, senior fellow at Massey College, and fellow of Paris’s International Science Council.
François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s Minister of Industry, Science and Economic Development, recently announced that the federal government will restrict funding between Canadian scientists and those of countries that may pose a security risk. That decision has raised many concerns, including around academic freedom, and calls for more clarity around how the policy will be implemented.
But there is a broader issue that has not been discussed. Our challenge with China is being framed as a security issue – arguably, however, it is primarily a scientific and an economic one, driven by the current revolution in science and the simultaneous emergence of China as a science superpower, with a knowledge-based economy that rivals that of the Western democracies. That difference in framing produces very different policy responses.
A revolution in nearly all areas of science – and the resulting creation of companies and economic growth – is under way, driven by vastly increased and cheaper computing power, artificial-intelligence-based tools that can analyze large amounts of data, and the collision of seemingly unrelated areas of research. The results have been exciting, as the boundaries of human knowledge expand. They have also been valuable, as this expanding knowledge is creating wealth and employment, improving human health and addressing global challenges such as pandemics and climate change.
Advances include the increasing agility of machine learning and other AI applications, the birth of quantum computing, the ability to manipulate genomes, the rapid development of vaccines against pathogens such as COVID-19, increased efficiencies of large organizations, and acceleration in the transition to renewable, scalable and affordable forms of energy.
For example, in a little more than 20 years, the cost of sequencing the human genome has decreased to less than $1,000 today from about US$100-million. This enormous reduction in cost has democratized DNA sequencing and opened new areas of research. It is also transforming clinical care through the now-routine application of DNA sequencing to diagnose disease, discover drugs and develop treatments for disease.
Science has been the major driver of progress and economic growth for the past 200 years. We’ve recently seen the importance of global scientific collaboration between countries, including China: International collaboration resulted in the development of vaccines against COVID-19 in record time. And so while the Canadian government is proposing a virtual wall to prevent scientific leakage to Chinese institutions from Canadian labs, history shows that taking such an approach will at best only slow down, not stop, scientific interchange.
Alternatively, Canada can learn from the U.S., where President Joe Biden’s government has invested more than US$280-billion in strategically important areas of research through the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. Canada should likewise continue to support the decision that was made a generation ago to increase our investments in university research to levels that are internationally competitive, as that research is essential for our public policy goals and our economic future.
Ottawa should articulate priority areas and align research investments to achieve these policy objectives. One way to accelerate the work is to create networks of institutes, attached to but separate from universities; they would bring together talent whose mission is to address specific challenges, train the next generation of scientists and partner with industry. The model was pioneered by the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy that was led by CIFAR, funded by the Canadian government and involved the creation of three institutions, in Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal.
The history of science is replete with examples where profound advances in one area contribute to breakthroughs in others, and so a successful policy of mission-driven science must include increased investments in all areas of research. After all, who can predict the future?
We also need to forge collaborations with like-minded liberal democracies to strengthen our science and its applications. This is especially important for Canada: We are a small country with neither the size nor the economy to compete against the Chinese, or indeed any large prosperous country.
We must not let our concerns about security override the importance of global scientific collaboration, which advances our economic well-being and helps us address the increasingly frequent and daunting global challenges of the 21st century.