Mid-week podcast: Canada's "massive confusion" over innovation
CBC Radio | Posted: June 15, 2016 8:23 PM | Last Updated: June 15, 2016
"We are so bad at innovation that anything that we'll try now will probably improve it."
Dan Breznitz, the Munk Chair of Innovation Studies and co-director of the Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, desperately wants to see Canada develop an innovation strategy.
The federal government announced this week that it will launch public consultations to ultimately develop such a thing.
Navdeep Bains, the federal minister of innovation, science and economic development said: "It's the desire to challenge the status quo, it's about finding solutions to problems and the outcome of innovation fundamentally is improving one's quality of life, standard of living. It's about good quality jobs."
But the minister also acknowledged the federal government's past struggles to design a succeful approach to innovation.
"We in the past have looked at tax policy to spur R&D investment, but we ranked 22 out of 34 OECD countries," he said.
In an interview with The House, Breznitz warned that there are no easy solutions, and that long-term planning is crucial.
"Waiting for a silver bullet when we know that every silver bullet ever tried on any country on earth actually needs tweaking and changing... that's probably not the way to go," he told Chris Hall.
"What I don't see is that my country is creating a capacity to actually develop, implement and constantly learn and improve our innovation policy," Breznitz added.
You can listen to the full interview below.
Also on this week's podcast, now that the Senate has made seven amendments to the government's physician-assisted dying legislation, what will happen to C-14?
We talk to Susan Lunn about the upcoming battle between the Red Chamber and the House of Commons.