SUPPLIED
The Right Honourable Paul Martin, former Prime Minister of Canada
Twenty-five years ago, a group of university leaders confirmed an unfortunate fact: many of Canada’s most notable scientists were leaving the country in the “brain drain.”
Scott Clark, the deputy minister of Finance at the time, and I were pleased to lend our support to the establishment of the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to provide the environment, labs and state-of-the-art equipment needed to retain top researchers in Canada.
Today, the CFI continues its work to serve researchers here and also to enrich their work by attracting engaged innovators from around the world to join them and by providing support and inspiration for the next generation of researchers across Canada.
We can find stellar examples of the CFI’s successful investments, for instance, in artificial intelligence, where researchers continue to break new ground in understanding the principles of machine-learning techniques, and the CHIME radio telescope, which is figured in the news this year by identifying mysterious bursts of radio waves from outer space.
Support for researchers at the University of Manitoba to build the digital architecture for an archival repository of more than five million documents collected by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada will help to make these important documents accessible. And just as the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo opened doors 25 years ago for Canadian researchers in theoretical physics, a project to create a Centre for Indigenous Knowledge and Learning at the University of Guelph is now opening its doors to the next generation of scholars in Canada.
We should all be proud of the CFI, which has enabled – and will continue to enable – researchers to flourish across Canada.
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