Research, education and creativity could pave way for Ontario's economic recovery

Premier Dalton McGuinty speaks with scientists at OICR during a visit to the Institute in April 2008.
(CPimages/S. Sacco)

Ontario faces serious economic challenges, but the way it responds to de-industrialization also presents a tremendous opportunity to re-focus the province’s economy on research, innovation and creativity. Several of Ontario’s leading minds are making this point, and Premier Dalton McGuinty has indicated his government is listening.

Richard Florida, Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and Roger Martin, Dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, released a report February 5 calling for Ontario’s government and business sector to re-invest their energies in the “creative economy.”

“Ontario is in the midst of a global economic transformation,” write Florida and Martin in the report, Ontario in the Creative Age. “While this transformation to a knowledge-or idea-driven creative economy has been underway for more than three decades, the current financial and economic maelstrom has accentuated its importance.”

Using demographic and labour market data, they argue that Ontario is ideally suited to capitalize on growth in the number of high-paying knowledge-sector jobs in the global economy. They cite the province’s arts communities and Toronto’s media industry as prime examples of these jobs. But they also note that in economic language, “creative” also encompasses many roles in science, business, the public sector and even some types of retail. The distinguishing feature of a creative job is that the employee is paid primarily to think, rather than to perform a routine task.

Research and health care are two sectors with high growth potential. In addition to improving the health of Canadians, provinces can gain economic advantages by investing in the research and infrastructure needed to bring new diagnostic tools and therapies to patients. For example, Tom Hudson, President and Scientific Director of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), says Canada is uniquely positioned to avail itself of the promises of personalized medicine.

“In conjunction with other international discoveries, Canadians have been involved in the first wave of translation leading to personalized medicine: discovery of genes, mutations, biomarkers, and molecular pathways that are associated with diseases such as autism, type II diabetes, coronary heart disease, inflammatory bowel disease, susceptibility to infection, colon cancer, and drug response,” Hudson wrote in an article that appeared in the February 18, 2009 issue of the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association (CMAJ). “To launch the second wave of translation activity from the Human Genome Project to personalized medicine, significant investment is needed in clinical research to integrate new genomic knowledge in clinical trials and population research.”

While Ontario’s government has recently made a number of high-profile loans to prevent the collapse of industries that employ large numbers of people in routine jobs, it has also indicated a need to shift the province away from manufacturing and unskilled service-sector jobs over the longer term, as more and more opportunities arise in creative and skilled industries.

In 2005, McGuinty created the Ministry of Research and Innovation, a stand-alone government department that funds leading-edge research in a wide range of areas and develops strategies to help create a climate where innovators can succeed. The Ministry’s investments include a $350-million, five-year funding commitment to establish OICR, along with funding for many other institutes and not-for-profits whose workforces are composed primarily of highly skilled, creative individuals in areas such as science, information technology and project management.

Meanwhile, the health care system will also require investment to ensure that the benefits of new treatments developed out of knowledge about the human genome flow to patients. Ontario is seeking to become a leader in this area through investments in its cancer system, and also through research.

OICR’s Clinical Trials Programs that make it easier to open and recruit patients for clinical trials in Ontario, and a High Impact Clinical Trials Program aimed at meeting the challenge of testing new discoveries as the pace of biomedical research becomes ever more rapid are two of many initiatives in Ontario that apply research to the health care system. The province’s Molecular Oncology Task Force, which recently reported back to the Ontario Government on the status of genetic testing for cancer in Ontario, identified many opportunities that should be pursued in Ontario. Molecular tests are used to diagnose cancer and also to test whether patients will respond to personalized therapies that have been developed using new knowledge about the human genome.

“Our goal is to bring 100 per cent of discoveries to patients in Ontario. We understand the need to do the translational research that will get these discoveries to patients,” said Hudson at an event to announce the task force’s recommendations. “In Ontario, we’re doing some of the best cancer research in the world. We want to close the gap between this research and what’s happening in the clinic.”

Investment in education

The Government of Ontario’s broader strategy is intended to shift the entire economy toward well-paying, sustainable sectors in the years and decades to come. Many of these measures are aimed at ensuring the province’s workforce is ready for creative jobs – almost all of which require at least one post-secondary diploma or degree.

The province has already invested heavily in increasing the number of seats at universities and re-designing the college system to educate more creative professionals. In 2005 Ontario opened a new institution in Oshawa, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, which offers programs blending practical and theoretical learning in a region that has been hit hard by job losses in the automotive sector.

Martin and Florida call these types of investments a step in the right direction. They would like to see Ontario make a conscious effort to establish itself as “the education province.” Ontario already has excellent universities and a relatively high level of postsecondary attainment compared to the North American average, but is not yet immediately identifiable as an “education jurisdiction” like Massachusetts.

Massachusetts provides elite education for the world’s brightest and wealthiest, but it is also a place where the educational spirit rubs off on the everyday economy. More people in Massachusetts have a post-secondary degree than in Ontario, and in turn, more jobs are created in creative industries: 37 per cent of Massachusetts’ workforce is employed in creative industries versus 30 per cent in Ontario. As a hub for immigrants, young professionals and artists, Ontario could be even better equipped to capitalize on high educational attainment rates than Massachusetts.

Martin and Florida recommend that Ontario remain open to high levels of immigration and continue to welcome highly skilled professionals from around the world. However, they also urge the government to try very hard to encourage more people who are born here to attend university or college. The percentage of jobs requiring post-secondary education is estimated to rise to 70 per cent, meaning that the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds attending post-secondary schools will need to increase from 40 per cent to 60 per cent to avoid job shortages even if Ontario continues to attract large numbers of skilled immigrants.

In their report, Martin and Florida call the province’s decision requiring youth to stay in school until age 18 a step in the right direction. “In the creative age, the best safety net we can provide to a would-be high school dropout is the refusal to allow an act that will doom the young citizen to a life of near-certain poverty due to lack of the essential skills for the creative age,” they write.

Meanwhile in higher-level education, investments in research today can lead to major payoff tomorrow. Research at universities and large not-for-profits like OICR provides many opportunities for PhD candidates, postdoctoral fellows and other researchers to make the transition from education to work – in addition to generating economic activity and creating the potential to find solutions to problems facing humanity.

Canada’s research community was therefore disappointed to learn from this year’s federal budget of funding decreases for Canada’s research councils, the major funders of research in Canada. “Canadian scientists cannot lag behind after leaping ahead and securing prominent positions on international podiums,” Hudson wrote in the CMAJ.

The Conservative government’s decision means that Canadian researchers will not be able to make a contribution to the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) in addition to OICR’s pancreatic project. Genomics experts in Canada had expressed enthusiasm for collaborating on this and other projects in Canada at a planning meeting in October 2008, and were disappointed to learn that Genome Canada will not be able to fund new proposals in the coming year.

The federal government’s move does not affect Ontario’s provincially funded genomics activities, which include the OICR Cancer Genomics Platform, the Secretariat and Data Collaboration Centre of the ICGC (both of which are located at OICR) and the Ontario Genomics Institute.

“We are still strongly committed to making a Canadian contribution to the worldwide effort to translate knowledge about the human genome into new ways to diagnose and treat cancer,” Hudson says. “This investment offers tremendous potential to future generations whose lives will be affected by cancer. In these turbulent economic times, it also creates economic activity in an area of the economy that is likely to grow and helps to build solid opportunities for the next generation of Ontarians.”