Things Be Grim: The State of Science, Technology and Innovation in Canada in 2025
Some quick takeaways from the new CCA Report
This week saw the publication of the Council of Canadian Academies’ landmark report: The State of Science, Technology and Innovation in Canada 2025.
This report is the latest in a long-running series, dating back to 2005, that serves as our most rigorous benchmarking of Canada’s research and innovation performance. Over the years, these reports have provided some of the best sources of data and evidence to understand the strengths and weaknesses of Canadian innovation.
Unfortunately for all of us, the overall picture has remained consistent. The 2018 report concluded that despite “Canada’s mostly undiminished capacity for high-quality research and extensive pools of research talent,” Canada suffered from “declining levels of private and public R&D expenditures [that] threaten to erode Canada’s research capacity over time.” Furthermore, “the loss of innovative start-ups to foreign buyers, and the inability to grow a sufficient number of start-ups to scale, means that Canadians do not fully capture the social and economic benefits stemming from Canadian research advances.”
These hit on many of the themes and findings of the latest report. However, if anything, the outlook now is substantially worse. Indeed, the 2025 report goes as far as saying:
While many groups have been signalling concern about Canada’s innovation performance over the course of the last two or more decades, the expert panel for this report believes the ongoing deterioration has reached a point where maintaining the nation’s standard of living may be at risk.
The expert panel goes on to conclude:
Without ambitious and decisive action across the ecosystem to reverse declining performance, Canada’s economy will struggle to provide Canadians with a standard of living they have come to expect. Without improved governance, greater public–private collaboration, and effective execution, Canada’s highly fragmented system will likely continue to underperform. The nation’s ability to deliver quality public health care and education, job opportunities, and affordable housing will be jeopardized. The set of societal challenges Canada faces today surely provides the burning platform needed to drive bold changes.
That is pretty grim. For a report like this, guided by established experts and written by committee, to put things in terms like that shows what a bad shape the Canadian innovation system is in.
If I could be as bold as to hazard a translation of the subtext, it is basically saying the state of science, innovation, and technology in Canada in 2025 is an absolute shit show, and we need to get our fucking act together fast.
The report contains a remarkable amount of data and analysis to support such dire conclusions. It comes in at 251 pages long, plus a further batch of eight evidence syntheses that I’ve not had the chance yet to dive properly into (though you can read a summary of
’s contribution on his CanInnovate blog here).So far, I’ve only had time to skim over the full report. Even doing that, though, yields some fascinating and worrying insights, such as the finding that “innovation by Canadian businesses has decreased noticeably in recent years” and that the acquisition, development, and use of new technologies has also “substantially decreased.” Just when you think we’re going slowly, it turns out we’re actually going backwards.
I want to dive more into the report over the coming weeks, but for now, I’ll leave you with this conclusion from Ilse Treurnicht, Chair of the Expert Panel:
In the long run, Canada’s greatest natural resource is its talented, well-educated, and diverse population. Our greatest weakness is an economy that consistently underuses and undervalues the capacity of Canadians to create prosperity for future generations. Remedying that weakness in the years ahead is not achievable by government policy shifts alone but must be a priority for leaders in every social and economic sector.
We urgently need to heed that advice.