Canada Must Make Smart Investments in These Stupid Times
An opinion editorial article by Dr. Richard Gold
Published February 19, 2025 in the Globe and Mail
Richard Gold is the director of McGill University’s Centre for Intellectual Property Policy, chief policy and partnerships officer at Conscience—an independent organization building open science drug discovery to address unmet health needs—and senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation as well as one of the lead Open Science, Practices and Partnership researchers at TRIDENT.
While Canada faces a crisis owing to U.S. President Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs, the United States is undergoing its own violent policy spasms. With the U.S. cutting the budgets of its world leading science institutions – the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Science Foundation, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – and the universities that conduct research, its dominance in science and innovation is in jeopardy.
Rather than suffer Mr. Trump’s whims passively, Canada can take advantage of his denigration of science. Canada should double down on investing in its science and data infrastructure to become a force in science and innovation.
Innovation drives the modern economy. Universities provide two essential elements that are critical to innovation: training the work force and creating the infrastructure that attracts companies. University graduates power innovation within technology companies and make it possible for other companies to become more productive through adoption of that technology. University researchers also create the large datasets and tools that provide the foundations of innovation, such as the Human Genome Project that underlies the biopharmaceutical industry and the Protein Data Bank that led to the Nobel prize-winning AlphaFold2 that has upended drug discovery.
With uncertainty in the U.S. over research funding and over the topics that researchers can pursue, Canada has the opportunity to increase the standing of its research and set the foundations for a more productive and innovative economy. To achieve this goal, both the federal and provincial governments need to act boldly and decisively.
Canada needs to provide work permits to disenchanted U.S. scientists who have seen their funding threatened and their research put into question. This can be done quickly under existing legislation. Further, Canada needs to attract the world’s top graduate students to work with those researchers. Even if the U.S. scientists return to the U.S. under the next administration, many of those graduate students would remain in Canada and contribute to our economy.
Provinces must reverse funding cuts at universities and invest significantly so that they can provide a home to those U.S. researchers who come to Canada. Quebec would need to reinvest, particularly in McGill University, which is facing an annual cut of$45-million, while Ontario would need to reverse cuts to its universities and collegesthat are dismantling programs. The short-term budgetary benefits of cutting postsecondary education is dwarfed by the economic benefits of welcoming the U.S. scientists and turning Canada into a knowledge powerhouse.
Canada also needs to increase its research funding – which is at its lowest levels in inflation-adjusted dollars – to not only support new researchers but to build the data –currently threatened in the U.S. – and the data infrastructure that will attract innovative firms, such as in the artificial intelligence field. Investing in research and developing a plan to ensure that the data that scientists produce feeds into the health and tech industries in Canada are critical to our ability to produce companies that not only drive growth but increase productivity.
Lastly, Canada needs to support partnerships between universities and industry. These partnerships are more efficient in creating innovation and provide a route for graduates to either enter the private sector or create their own companies. This support must recognize that the old ways of organizing partnerships around narrow, closed relationships, is no longer efficient. Instead, as the AI industry has demonstrated: “Open always wins.”
These are bold propositions. But if Canada is to counter the current economic attack from the U.S., it must act boldly to build an economy that not only flies but soars.
Canada Must Hit The U.S. Where It Hurts Most: Its Lucrative Patents
An opinion editorial article by Dr. Richard Gold
Published January 22, 2025 in the Globe and Mail
Richard Gold is the director of McGill University’s Centre for Intellectual Property Policy, chief policy and partnerships officer at Conscience—an independent organization building open science drug discovery to address unmet health needs—and senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation as well as one of the lead Open Science, Practices and Partnership researchers at TRIDENT.
Tariffs, which the U.S. president has constantly said he would introduce, are a threat to Canada’s national economic security. If Donald Trump follows through, Canada must respond with all economic weapons at its disposal, a key armament of which is intellectual property such as patents. This country has the right, under both Canadian and international law, to effectively suspend patent rights held by U.S.-controlled companies in key sectors, such as pharmaceuticals and artificial intelligence. Doing so would put tremendous pressure on the Trump administration.
Under the World Trade Organization and section 19 of Canada’s Patent Act, Canada can circumvent U.S.-controlled patents, freeing up Canadian companies to make patented drugs as well as develop AI-based inventions and other key technologies to sell predominantly in Canada but also around the world. Given the national emergency that Trump’s Tariffs would create, Canada could immediately seek permission to accord these rights from the Commissioner of Patents, a public servant in charge of the Canadian patent office.
Canada’s future economy depends on our ability to harness and have control over intangible assets, such as patents and other intellectual property. While the U.S. has advanced its intangibles economy through patents, it has constrained Canadian economic sovereignty through trade deals that require Canada to give U.S. companies greater patent rights. Canada can regain some of this lost sovereignty by working around U.S.-controlled patents.
Canada has always had an uneasy relationship with patents, most of which are controlled by foreign companies that take our academic knowledge and sell it back to Canadians for pennies on the dollar. In return for Canada giving the pharmaceutical industry greater patent rights in the late 1980s, the industry promised to increase its research investments to 10 per cent of its Canadian revenues, far below the rates in competitor countries. Although it did for most of the 1990s, the industry has failed to meet that target since 2000 and has a lower rate of investment today than when the deal was done. At the same time, Canadian biotech companies are faced with the choice of either selling their assets to U.S. businesses or going bankrupt.
Despite being a leader in AI technology, Canada has little control over the patents that its own largely publicly funded research has produced. Jim Hinton, a patent lawyer specializing in AI, found that three-quarters of patents produced by Canada’s two leading AI institutes leave the country. Canada may produce key AI inventions, but it does not profit from them.
On the other hand, the United States is the largest recipient of foreign income from its intellectual property, having raked in US$127.39 billion in 2022. Taking into account its size, the U.S. is fifth in international payments for its intellectual property, while Canada is 17th. In a game of intellectual property tit-for-tat, Canada could cause key U.S. industries far more pain than the U.S. can impose on our companies.
By exercising its powers under international and Canadian law to limit U.S.-controlled patents, Canada would not only curtail the current extraction of Canadian wealth to the U.S. when Canadians pay U.S. companies for patented goods, it would also enhance its sovereignty over the intangible economy. Canada is a powerhouse of academic knowledge that, once free of U.S.-controlled patents, could use that knowledge to produce lower-cost medicines, ramp up AI-assisting drug discovery, develop new climate-related technology and render our health systems more efficient.
If the U.S. chooses to declare economic warfare on Canada, this country needs to adopt policies that not only cost U.S. companies dearly, but that create opportunities for Canadian businesses as well. Our companies can compete in a world where knowledge is open rather than hoarded by U.S. businesses. Let’s give them that opportunity.