Business Archives - Page 573 of 573

President Barroso’s speech at the Euroscience Open Forum

Business, featuredJune 22, 2014July 3, 2014 admin

European Commission

[Check Against Delivery]

José Manuel Durão Barroso

President of the European Commission

President Barroso’s speech at the Euroscience Open Forum

Science building bridges

Euroscience Open Forum

Copenhagen, 22 June 2014

Your Majesty,

Dear Minister [Sofie Carsten-Nielsen, Minister of Higher Education and Science]

Dear Chair of ESOF [ESOF2014 Champion Professor Klaus Bock]

Dear President [Euroscience President, Professor Lauritz Holm-Nielsen]

Distinguished Guests,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It gives me great pleasure to be here with you today for the 2014 Euroscience Open Forum. I would like to thank you for inviting me to take part in this very important event.

In a country with over 400 islands, with three bridges over six kilometres long, what more appropriate theme could have been given to this Forum than “Science building bridges”.

A country world-known for its scientific leadership; for its expertise across a range of fields, from clean technology to biotechnology, from pharmaceuticals to telecommunications.

A country proud and confident about its knowledge-based society, renowned for its openness, and desire to cooperate internationally; a country whose bridge, the Oresund Bridge, links, not just two countries, i.e. Sweden and Denmark, but Europe’s regions, from Scandinavia to Western and Central Europe.

Your Majesty,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

[Europe 2020/Horizon 2020]

As we start to move out of the worst financial and economic crisis since the 1930s, now is the time to focus on building a strong, sustainable future.

On building a bridge between our past scientific traditions and a world where we share increasingly important global challenges and where we need innovative solutions.

That is precisely why, back in 2010, we put in place our new Europe 2020 strategy, designed to build a balanced, knowledge-based economy, with education, science, research and innovation at its very heart.

That is also why we have managed to make the seven year budget for our European research programme, Horizon 2020, 30% larger than its predecessor, despite the slight decrease in the European budget as a whole. It was not easy but we got it. We managed to convince Member States that at least the science and innovation budget should be increased. At 80 billion Euros over seven years, Horizon 2020 is one of if not the largest research and innovation programme in the world, designed to complement other sources of national and private financing.

We have therefore managed to match ambition with resources, giving you the researchers the stability and long term commitment that you need.

This goes to show, as we discuss the challenges facing us in the years ahead, that science does indeed matter for the future of Europe.

Not just to a large audience such as yours, but to everyone in our societies. Because I believe that our social and economic progress and many of the solutions to today’s problems will come from science. And I would even say that “The future of Europe is science”.

[Successes]

As our recent Communication on research and innovation as sources for growth has shown, we have a lot to be confident about.

Europe undoubtedly remains a world leader in science and has the capacity to innovate.

Our European Research Area remains the largest knowledge-production house in the world: we have twice the number of science and technology graduates in Europe than in the United States; and with 7% of the world’s population, we still produce roughly a third not only of the GDP, but also of patents and high impact scientific publications.

And despite the financial and economic crisis we have managed to halve the innovation gap that we still have with the United States and Japan.

[More to do]

But we cannot afford to stand still, in a world where scientific and technological progress is accelerating at an unprecedented pace, and where South Korea is moving further ahead, with China quickly catching us up.

So we must adapt to the new challenges and new ways of working in the 21st Century.

The role of digital technologies and the wealth of information and data that is being produced pose many questions about how science and research will be performed in the future. I know that Commissioner Geoghegan-Quinn, whom I would like to congratulate, for her commitment and passion on these issues during her term as Commissioner, will discuss this particular matter with you on Tuesday morning.

We must also adapt our culture so that women are better represented in research and science, another matter close to my heart: indeed, whilst women hold 45% of all PhDs in Europe, they only represent 30% of career researchers.

Last but not least, we must bring in our younger generation into science and innovation, reinforcing and tailoring our educational systems so that they more fully embrace creativity and risk.

This is key to Europe’s future.

Your Majesty,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Allow me to highlight briefly five bridges that we have been building and that we must collectively continue to build.

First, we are building bridges between all the scientific disciplines. Our Innovation Union seeks to mainstream science and innovation across all sectors, and cross-fertilise your ideas to develop new technologies, products and services for the complex multi-disciplinary challenges in our societies. This is why Horizon 2020 champions a challenge-based approach and why the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, recently launched its Call for Proposals for the Knowledge and Innovation Communities.

Secondly, we are building bridges between researchers and the general public. Horizon 2020 is a large programme, with a broad set of objectives from excellence in science – with the European Research Council now chaired by Professor Bourguignon – to industrial leadership and a number of key societal challenges, allowing us to focus on the big priorities relevant to every European citizen. I am very proud of the ERC. But in order to ensure that the progress you make, for example on new vaccinations or nano-technology, is properly explained and embraced rather than feared, across society, we need a considerable communication effort from scientists themselves as well as from policy makers. There is an important role for the media here.

Thirdly, we are building bridges between the laboratory and the marketplace. After 30 years of negotiation, we finally agreed a European-wide patent. Once fully implemented, this will reduce the cost by up to 80% for small and medium sized businesses and individual researchers to register their creative ideas. This should encourage more private investment, because at 1.30% of GDP, we still lag behind the United States, Japan or South Korea, where private investment, venture capital and the culture of risk are more widely shared.

Fourthly, we are building bridges between Member States. With the European Research Area, we are encouraging reforms for a greater mobility of researchers and for pan-European research infrastructures.

But our countries must make an equal effort in research if we are to bridge the gap in investment across Europe, and if research opportunities are available across Europe. Collectively, we are missing our Europe 2020 target of 3% GDP in research and development, averaging just under 2%, with more regional disparity and ten Member States still averaging under 1%. We are doing fiscal consolidation but we need smart fiscal consolidation.

Finally, we are building bridges internationally, trying to reach out to all countries in the world. Only two weeks ago, I signed an agreement with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, granting Israel – a leading nation in science and innovation – access to our Horizon 2020 programme, as part of our science diplomacy. The principle behind this agreement, as well as with agreements we have with twenty other partners, is simple: it is that we can tackle together more smartly and efficiently the global challenges we face. And this is also why I am pleased to see so many international participants at today’s Forum.

[Conclusion]

Your Majesty,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We cannot afford to rest.

And although Niels Bohr once said that prediction is very difficult, especially if it is about the future, I have nevertheless asked the Science and Technology Advisory Council and Professor Anne Glover, my Chief Scientific Adviser, to produce a report on foresight. Let me take this opportunity to thank them for their dedication to this work, which will be unveiled in the conference “The future of Europe is science”, to be held in Lisbon on 6th and 7th of October.

I look forward to a successful Euroscience Forum and to an ever increasing role of Europe in science and innovation, with a view to the next Forum in 2016, in Manchester.

Thank you.

Arms Control and International Security: Implementing Missile Defense in a Global Context

BusinessJune 18, 2014 admin

Thank you for that kind introduction. It’s great to be back in Germany and I am particularly honored to address the 3AF Missile Defense Conference again this year.

In my remarks this morning, I would like to discuss three key issues:

First, the Obama Administration’s commitment to ballistic missile defense (BMD) and the Fiscal Year 2015 missile defense budget request;
Second, the significant progress the United States and our NATO partners are making in implementing the European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA); and;
Third, cooperation on missile defense with allies and partners outside of Europe.

The U.S. Missile Defense Budget

It is no secret that governments around the world, including the United States, are working very hard to do more with less. This, of course, includes our investments in our national security. Despite these challenges, you will see—and the proof is in the numbers—that the United States is continuing to ensure that our missile defense priorities are funded, on track and on budget.

In March of this year, President Obama released his Fiscal Year 2015 budget submission that aligns defense program priorities and resources with the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). I would like to highlight for you a few of the missile defense aspects of the President’s request.

Overall, the budget request provides $8.5 billion for our missile defense programs, including $7.5 billion for the Missile Defense Agency. With regard to U.S. homeland defense, the budget request provides funding to increase the number of long-range missile defense interceptors deployed in Alaska and California from 30 to 44 by 2017. The request also funds a number of other programs to enhance the long-range BMD system such as a new kill vehicle and a new long-range discrimination radar. With regard to regional missile defense, the budget continues to provide adequate funding to complete work on the missile defense base at Devesulu, Romania and provides additional funding of $225.7 million for the missile defense base at Slupsk in Poland. The request also includes $435.4 million for the procurement of SM-3 Block IB interceptors and $263.9 for continued development of the longer-range SM-3 Block IIA interceptor.

As you can see from these numbers, the United States continues to devote significant resources to our missile defense programs. These programs are an important part of ensuring the national security of the United States, as well as our allies and partners. With regard to the EPAA, this budget request clearly signals the importance the U.S. places on the program. We believe that the resources we are allocating to our missile defense programs demonstrate our commitment to establish ever more capable missile defenses, both in Europe and other regions, to address growing ballistic missile threats. As U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel noted in March 2013, the U.S. commitment to NATO missile defense and to the sites in Romania and Poland remains “ironclad.”

European Phased Adaptive Approach

Moving on, I would like to take a few moments to discuss the implementation of the President’s European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA) to missile defense. In 2009, when the President announced the EPAA, he noted that the EPAA will “provide stronger, smarter, and swifter defenses of American forces and America’s Allies,” while relying on “capabilities that are proven and cost-effective.” And since then, we have been working hard to implement his vision—and we have made great progress in doing so. Earlier this month, President Obama noted in Poland that we are “on track” with the EPAA.

Phase 1 of the EPAA gained its first operational elements in 2011 with the start of a sustained deployment of an Aegis BMD-capable multi-role ship to the Mediterranean and the deployment of an AN/TPY-2 radar in Turkey. With the declaration of Interim BMD Capability at the NATO Summit in Chicago in May 2012, this radar transitioned to NATO operational control. As part of Phase 1, Spain agreed in 2011 to host four U.S. Aegis BMD-capable ships at the existing naval facility at Rota as a Spanish contribution to NATO missile defense, demonstrating its commitment to NATO’s collective defense. In February 2014, the first of four of these ships, USS Donald Cook, arrived in Rota. The next ship, USS Ross, is on its way now. The remaining two will deploy to Rota next year. In addition to their roles in NATO BMD, these ships will conduct maritime security operations, humanitarian missions, bi-lateral and multi-lateral training exercises, and they will support U.S. and NATO operations. By stationing these naval assets in Spain, we are placing them in a position to maximize their operational flexibility for missions in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

With regard to Phase 2, we have an agreement in force with Romania to host a U.S. Aegis Ashore site beginning in 2015. Last October, I had the honor of attending the ground-breaking ceremony at Deveselu Air Base to commemorate the start of construction for this site. When this site is operational, and combined with BMD-capable ships in the Mediterranean, NATO will gain enhanced coverage from short- and medium-range ballistic missiles launched from the Middle East. I also had the opportunity last year to visit the Lockheed-Martin facility in Moorestown, New Jersey where they built the Aegis Ashore deck house and components destined for Romania. The deck house has been disassembled and is currently in transit to Romania.

In furtherance of Phase 2, on May 21, the United States successfully conducted the first flight test involving components of the Aegis Ashore system, including the SM-3 IB interceptor. During the test, a simulated ballistic missile target was acquired, tracked, and engaged by the Aegis Weapon System. A live target missile launch was not planned for this flight test.

Before moving on to Phase 3, I would like to stress that we remain on schedule for deploying the system to Romania, with the site becoming operational in 2015.

And finally there is Phase 3. Phase 3 includes an Aegis Ashore site in Poland equipped with the new SM-3 Block IIA interceptor, per the Ballistic Missile Defense agreement between the United States and Poland which entered into force in September 2011. This site is on schedule to be operational in 2018. The interceptor site in Poland is key to the EPAA. When combined with other EPAA assets, Phase 3, which begins in the 2018 timeframe, will provide the necessary capabilities to provide ballistic missile defense coverage of all NATO European territory. So, as you can see; we are continuing to successfully implement the President’s vision for stronger, smarter and swifter missile defenses going forward.

NATO Cooperation

In addition to the support and burden sharing as part of the EPAA undertaken by Spain, Turkey, Poland and Romania, NATO Heads of State and Government noted at the Chicago Summit that there were potential opportunities for using synergies in planning, development, procurement, and deployment of NATO missile defense.

In our view, with this in mind, there are three approaches Allies can take to make valuable contributions to NATO BMD.

First, Allies can acquire fully capable BMD systems possessing sensor, shooter and command and control capabilities.
Second, Allies can acquire new sensors or upgrade existing ones to provide a key BMD capability.
Third, Allies can contribute to NATO’s defense by providing air defense capability for U.S. BMD ships underway on a NATO mission.

In all of these approaches, however, the most critical requirement is NATO interoperability. While acquiring a BMD capability is, of course, good in and of itself, without interoperability, its value as a contribution to Alliance deterrence and defense is significantly diminished. It is only through interoperability that the Alliance can gain the synergistic effects from BMD cooperation that enhance the effectiveness of NATO BMD, as well as the security of all NATO members through shared battle-space awareness and reduced interceptor wastage. Given the budget challenges many allies face today, this becomes even more imperative. Looking ahead, we are hopeful that missile defense will be a key deliverable at the Alliance’s Summit later this year in Wales.

Missile Defense Developments in Other Regions

Outside the NATO context, the United States is continuing to increase and deepen its cooperation with partners and allies around the world to protect people, forces, and assets from the growing ballistic missile threats that we face. As in Europe, we are tailoring our approaches to the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific so that they reflect the unique deterrence and defense requirements of each region.

In the Middle East, we are already cooperating with our key partners bilaterally and multilaterally through venues such as the recently established U.S.-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Strategic Cooperation Forum. At the September 26, 2013, Strategic Cooperation Forum (SCF), Secretary Kerry and his Foreign Ministry counterparts reaffirmed their intent, first stated at the September 28, 2012 SCF, to “work towards enhanced U.S.-GCC coordination on Ballistic Missile Defense.”

As you know, this is a time of profound change in that region and we are acutely aware of the daily threats and anxieties felt throughout the Gulf. Security cooperation has long stood at the core of the U.S.-Gulf partnership. The United States is not only committed to enhancing U.S.-GCC missile defense cooperation – we see it as a strategic imperative.

As stated in the 2010 Ballistic Missile Defense Review, a key objective of U.S. strategy is to expand international efforts and cooperation on ballistic missile defense. BMD cooperation contributes to regional stability by deterring regional actors, principally by eliminating their confidence in the effectiveness of their ballistic missiles, and assuring allies and partners of U.S. defense commitments while enhancing their ability to defend against these threats.

Less than two months ago I travelled to the Gulf to work toward enhanced U.S.—GCC coordination on ballistic missile defense. The message I delivered in the region was clear: the United States remains firmly committed to developing and deploying advanced missile defense capabilities around the world to protect our homeland, our deployed forces, as well as our friends and allies.

Several of our partners in the region have already expressed an interest in buying missile defense systems, and some have already done so. For example, the UAE has contracted to buy two THAAD batteries that, when operational, will enhance the UAE’s security as well as regional stability. The UAE also has taken delivery of its Patriot PAC-3 batteries, which provide a lower-tier, point defense of critical national assets. We look forward to advancing cooperation and interoperability with our GCC partners in the years ahead.

Additionally and separately, we are continuing our long-standing and robust cooperation with Israel on missile defense on key systems such as Arrow 3, David’s Sling, and Iron Dome.

In the Asia-Pacific, we are continuing to cooperate through our bilateral alliances. For example, the United States and Japan already are working closely to develop jointly an advanced interceptor known as the SM-3 Block IIA along with deployment of a second AN/TPY-2 radar to Japan, while continuing to work on enhancing interoperability between U.S. and Japanese forces. With the Republic of Korea, we are continuing to consult closely as it develops the Korean Air and Missile Defense system, which is designed to defend the ROK against air and missile threats from North Korea.

No Constraints

Before I conclude, let me speak about missile defense and Russia. Russia continues to demand that the United States provide it with “legally-binding” guarantees that our missile defenses will not negatively impact its strategic nuclear deterrent. What the Russians really mean is that they want legally-binding limitations or constraints on U.S. missile defenses—defenses we and our partners and allies believe must be flexible and unconstrained in order to adequately protect ourselves from emerging ballistic missile threats. Such “legally binding guarantees” would create limitations on our ability to develop and deploy future missile defense systems against regional ballistic missile threats such as those we see evolving in the Middle East and North Korea. We have repeatedly made clear to the Russian government that the United States cannot and will not accept any obligations that limit our ability to defend ourselves, our allies, and our partners, including where we deploy our BMD-capable Aegis ships.

As far as where things stand today regarding our discussions with Russia on missile defense, Russia’s intervention into the crisis in Ukraine, in violation of international law, has led to the suspension of our military-to-military dialogue and we are not currently engaging Russia on the topic of missile defense.

Conclusion

Let me conclude by saying that we have made a great deal of progress on missile defense over the past several years.

Thanks to the important work of our NATO Allies, implementation of the EPAA and NATO missile defense is going well. We are continuing to engage productively with our partners and allies in the Middle East and East Asia. And, as I noted earlier, Congress has continued to provide sufficient funding for missile defense programs, even in these times of tight budgets.

For our part, we look forward to continuing these successes and working with our allies and friends around the world to deepen our cooperation, both diplomatic and military, in pursuit of ensuring that missile defense remains a key part of deterring and defending against ballistic missile threats.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to your questions.

Harper Government Tables Text of Final Agreement of Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement

BusinessJune 13, 2014 admin

The Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement will benefit hard-working Canadians from all sectors in every region across the country

June 12, 2014 – Ottawa, Ontario – Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada

The Honourable Ed Fast, Minister of International Trade, today tabled the Text of Final Agreement of the Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement in the House of Commons. This tabling is yet another step by the Government of Canada toward ensuring transparency and openness in its efforts to implement the agreement as soon as possible.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and President Park Geun-hye of South Korea announced the conclusion of the Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement negotiations on March 11, 2014, in Seoul.

The Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement is a landmark achievement: it is Canada’s first free trade agreement in the Asia Pacific, one of the fastest-growing and most dynamic regions in the world. South Korea is not only a major economic player and a key market for Canada, but also serves as a gateway for Canadian businesses to the entire Asia-Pacific region.

On the first day it comes into force, the Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement will provide Canada with preferential new market access to South Korea’s 50 million consumers and annual $1.3-trillion economy. It will bring substantial benefits to Canadian consumers, exporters, producers and investors across Canada from coast to coast to coast.

Quick Facts

South Korea is already Canada’s third-largest trading partner in Asia (after China and Japan). Total merchandise trade between the two countries reached approximately $10.8 billion in 2013.
On the day the Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement comes into force, Canadian businesses will immediately benefit from South Korea’s removal of duties on 81.9 percent of tariff lines. Once the agreement is fully implemented, South Korea will have removed duties on 98.2 percent of tariff lines.
The Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement is projected to boost Canada’s economy by $1.7 billion and increase Canadian merchandise exports to South Korea by 32 percent.
Tariff elimination under the agreement will be particularly advantageous for Canadian businesses because average South Korean tariffs are three times higher than Canada’s (13.3 percent versus 4.3 percent).
Canadian businesses will benefit from a level playing field with their competitors in the South Korean market, notably competitors from the United States and the European Union.

Quotes

“The Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement, Canada’s first with an Asia-Pacific market, will create thousands of new jobs in Canada and provide Canadian businesses and workers with a gateway to Asia, enhancing their global competitiveness. It will also level the playing field for Canadian companies competing with Korea’s other trading partners, including the United States and the European Union, which already have free trade agreements with Korea.

“We are committed to working as expeditiously as possible through the remaining steps toward implementing the Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement so that Canadian workers and businesses can access the full range of benefits and opportunities as soon as possible. Today’s tabling is an important step toward delivering on our government’s most ambitious pro-trade plan to create jobs and opportunities for hard-working Canadians in every region of the country.”

– Ed Fast, Minister of International Trade

Associated Links

Contacts

Shannon Gutoskie
Press Secretary
Office of the Honourable Ed Fast
Minister of International Trade
613-992-7332

Media Relations Office
Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada
343-203-7700
media@international.gc.ca
Follow us on Twitter: @Canada_Trade
Like us on Facebook: Canada’s International Trade Plan-DFATD

Keynote speech to the WIRE V Conference

BusinessJune 12, 2014 admin

European Commission

[Check Against Delivery]

Máire GEOGHEGAN-QUINN

European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science

Keynote speech to the WIRE V Conference

WIRE V Conference

Athens, 12 June 2014

Ladies and Gentlemen,

First of all I wish to congratulate the Hellenic Presidency for organising this fifth edition of the Week of Innovative Regions in Europe, following on from Granada in 2010, Debrecen in 2011, Krakow in 2012 and Cork last year.

WIRE I in Granada in March 2010 was one of the first major policy events in which I participated as Commissioner, so I remember it well!

The successive conferences have given me the opportunity to take stock of ongoing developments in the important relationship between research and innovation and cohesion policies.

In 2010 we were just beginning to set the framework for the future of these policies.

By 2011, the cohesion regulations and Horizon 2020 were being drafted. By 2012 they had been adopted by the Commission and were under discussion with the Member States.

Those discussions were completed in 2013 and now, in 2014, the first calls for proposals under Horizon 2020 have already been launched – indeed, some are already being evaluated – while the cohesion programming documents are being submitted and adopted.

WIRE V builds on the work of these earlier conferences by focusing on the concept of smart specialisation and on a policy agenda that is very much results-oriented.

The three broad themes of this conference – European funding and smart specialisation for 2014-2020; business driven regional innovation and the use of open data and knowledge to drive scientific excellence – provide rich possibilities for debate and analysis, as is shown in the detailed programme for the next two days.

Smart specialisation is at the heart of WIRE V and with good reason.

In Granada in 2010, everyone was wondering about this new idea and what it would mean.

Things have moved quickly in just four years.

Now, future cohesion support for research and innovation is conditional on having a smart specialisation strategy in place. And more broadly speaking, such a strategy should also be the broad framework in which to pursue ‘smart growth’

I welcome the fact that many Member States, through the process of self-assessment, are reporting the existence of smart specialisation strategies, at national or regional level.

Nevertheless, I also know that other Member States and regions have not yet made the necessary progress and may need to submit action plans for later completion of their strategies.

Whatever your situation, I would urge that all strategies be put in place as soon as possible. Smart specialisation is now an essential, if not the essential tool in the successful planning and implementation of support for research and innovation.

As I said at WIRE IV, there is no denying that we have a considerable research and innovation divide in Europe – a divide that remains despite our best efforts.

There are several reasons for these disparities, mostly related to structural deficits such as lack of research investment, insufficient capacity-building, the structure of a country’s industries and the profile of its companies, as well as lack of access to international networks.

Cohesion policy has a crucial role to play in tackling this divide through capacity building. And a smart specialisation strategy can act as the blueprint.

Today’s discussion on Regional Innovation and European Growth couldn’t be more timely.

The Annual Growth Survey 2014 confirmed that, after five years of financial and economic crisis, the first signs of a slow recovery are starting to appear in Europe.

While we seem to have reached a turning point in the crisis, the recovery is still modest and very fragile, so these positive signs should not make us complacent, they should encourage us to take further measures to secure a lasting and sustainable recovery.

I think it is safe to say that we are all agreed – whether researchers, business people, policy makers or civil society – that research and innovation drives sustainable growth and jobs.

So if Europe is to re-take the path to a strong and lasting recovery, it will have to place its bets on research and innovation.

Since we last met at WIRE IV in Cork last year, the EU has launched new programmes for research and innovation and for cohesion.

Horizon 2020 couples research and innovation by focusing on excellent science, industrial leadership and tackling societal challenges, while the European Structural and Investment Funds are designed to ensure that this knowledge can be absorbed and used effectively.

Combining these two sources of funding could significantly increase their impact, which is why we have made sure that the two programmes are mutually compatible and mutually supporting.

Research and innovation is also taking an increasingly prominent place in the broader EU policy framework, and in particular the European Semester. I am therefore particularly pleased that, for the 2014 Semester, Country Specific Recommendations relating to research and innovation have been proposed by the Commission for 15 Member States, the highest number so far.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I’d now like to bring you right up to date with some news that’s hot off the press!

Two days ago I launched, together with Vice President Olli Rehn, a Communication on Research and Innovation as Sources of Renewed Growth.

One of the thorniest issues we have to face is how we square the circle of investing more in research and innovation in times of fiscal consolidation, when public budgets are under greatest pressure.

The very clear message from the Communication is to prioritise and to reform.

The Communication underlines the importance of investing in research and innovation in order to allow Europe to capture new growth opportunities.

In recent years, we have seen that continued investment in the sources of jobs and growth is paying off in several Member States and in the transformation of economies like South Korea and China.

And this is also what the EU did last year when it agreed its new seven-year budget. While the overall budget envelope was reduced, there is a decisive shift towards research and innovation, with Horizon 2020 seeing a 30% real terms increase in finance.

However, maintaining or increasing investment will only be most effective when they go hand in hand with measures to increase their quality.

We need far-reaching reforms of research and innovation systems in order to increase the quality and efficiency of public expenditure in these areas.

I have no illusions about how difficult this can be, having steered through the major reform of Horizon 2020 to be simpler and to achieve greater impact.

Our new proposals will support governments to make the necessary reforms to their own research and innovation systems.

And reform of Member States’ research and innovation systems will also encourage businesses to invest more in R&D and innovation. Many businesses look globally when they invest in research and innovation. So Europe, the Member States and regions must be able to put forward an attractive proposition.

Progress at European level, for example on the European patent, remains essential, so we will continue to implement the innovation-friendly measures championed by the Innovation Union initiative.

Alongside these framework conditions, there is the potential for smart investments by the public sector to leverage private investment.

Improvements in the quality and efficiency of public spending can help create a ‘virtuous circle’, by leveraging higher investment levels from the private sector and generating increasing economic returns.

No government can fund world class science and innovation in all areas, and so each country and region must take tough decisions to prioritise their research and innovation budget in the areas where it will produce the greatest impacts.

This brings us back to smart specialisation.

Here, European regions have a strong role to play: by identifying the most promising growth opportunities, they can reprioritise action and investments, build innovation frameworks and direct us towards solutions that foster growth and jobs. Regions can also profit from systemic learning and the exchange of good practice on smart specialisation.

I have a feeling that this new Communication will provide many ideas to discuss at a future WIRE conference.

In conclusion, let me once again express my gratitude to the Hellenic Presidency, including Georgia Tzenou of the National Documentation Centre and her team, as well as to my services in the directorate General for Research and Innovation, for organising this event.

As ever, I very much look forward to hearing concrete recommendations from your deliberations that can help us increase the impact of research and innovation across the EU at every level.

I would therefore like to wish all the participants a very enjoyable and productive conference.

Thank you.

Oceans Roundtable

BusinessJune 12, 2014 admin

MS. HARF: Hi everybody. Thank you to everyone for coming today. For those of you who I haven’t met, I’m Marie Harf. I’m the deputy spokesperson here. We’ll be moderating today’s discussion. We have several very distinguished speakers with us: Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Cathy Novelli will kick us of today. We also have the OES Deputy Assistant Secretary David Balton with us. This is all on the record, no embargo in any way for any of this.

As you know, the Secretary will be dropping by at some point during this conversation to make a few remarks and just take a couple of questions because his schedule is pretty tight, but he wanted to come have a discussion with you as well.

So with that, I’m going to turn it over the Under Secretary, I think will have some remarks, and then we’ll open it up to your questions and we will just go around the room when we do so.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Okay, great. Well, thank you all for being here. And I thought I could start by just giving you a little bit of a picture of what we’re expecting to have happen on Monday and Tuesday, which is that – the days that the Secretary is hosting the Our
Ocean conference. And when we started to look at this question, this was really the very first thing the Secretary talked to me about working on when he and I talked about me coming to the State Department. And I was absolutely delighted to be able to lead on this, because these are critical issues and they’re becoming more critical as time goes on.

And so when we looked at this conference and what we could do, we decided to focus it so that we could also focus results. And so we focused it on three areas, which are overfishing and illegal fishing, pollution of the ocean, and ocean acidification. And those three areas were areas that we arrived at in consultation with a number of eminent oceans experts, including our own oceans experts internally here at the State Department, but also in the NGO and the scientific community.

And the idea behind this conference is a slightly different one than all of the other very excellent conferences that have gone on, and that is that we wanted to look at the fact that we can’t solve these problems simply by government-to-government action; that all layers of society need to play a role here, and that includes individuals, it includes scientists, governments, the NGO community, and the private sector. And so we’ve designed a conference that actually gets all of those layers of society in one place to work on concrete solutions to these problems.

And the other thing that has struck me about working on this conference is that it is – obviously the ocean is vast and these problems are large and they are things that actually threaten our wellbeing, our livelihood, our environment, but there are people solving these issues around the world. And so one of the other things that we did is went out through our embassies to every space in the world to try to find the most credible people who are solving some of these problems in their own communities, in their own ways, to bring them to this conference so that we can have a conference that is looking at what is the path to solutions on this. And then sort of build from that at the end of the conference a list of policy direction that we can all take and that we can all agree is what we need to be doing at these various layers, so that we’re not just having a conference where everybody comes and talks; we’re having a conference where concrete things are occurring, where we’re setting up a path for more concrete things to occur through other conferences, other fora, and through a set of principles that governments, the private sector, NGOs, and regular people are going to be able to focus on.

And so the first thing that we’ve done in preparation for this is to do a social media campaign. You may have seen the Secretary’s call to action that he’s put out, and we’re getting a great response on that. And the idea behind that was to figure out, okay, what are the things, simple things, that individuals can do that are going to make a difference. So we asked them to do three things: only eat sustainably-caught seafood, not pollute the waterways and the oceans, and volunteer one day a year to clean up the waterways or the beaches.

And we’re getting – we’re putting that out there. We’re expecting a response. That’s obviously the layer, the individuals. There’s deeply scientific layers that look at things like ocean acidification, what does that mean, and how do we mitigate it. There are technical layers about how do we track fish so that we know whether they’ve been caught legally or illegally so that people can know whether their seafood has actually been caught sustainably or not. And all of these different things are what we’re going to be discussing at the conference.

So that is the idea that we’re going to have concrete results, that we’re building towards more concrete results in the future, with a pathway of how to get from point A to point B. And I don’t mean to suggest this is simple; it’s not. It’s very complicated. But it is also solvable, and that’s what we want to put the emphasis on, that we actually really can change the environment and change the way that these things are being addressed so that we do have sustainable fish for a huge percentage of the population that relies on it as its main source of protein, so that we have something that is economically sound and is creating and sustaining jobs, and so that we are also sustaining our environment.

So I’ll stop there and just – I’m happy to take questions.

MS. HARF: Great. Any opening thoughts, or do you just want to go right into questions? We’ll go right into questions. (Laughter.)

PARTICIPANT: Couldn’t have said it better myself.

MS. HARF: Great. Well, let’s just open it up. Go ahead.

QUESTION: Michele Kelemen, NPR —

MS. HARF: Yes, and please do identify yourself.

QUESTION: Can you just talk about any – what sort of – is there money involved here, are there specific projects you’re funding, announcements that you’re expecting to make. Thank you.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Yeah. We’re going to make very specific announcements. Those are going to be made at the conference, so I’m not going to go into those now. But there is money involved, there are specific actions involved, and there is going to also be sort of a path for the future. So we’re doing things today that are very tangible, and we’re also looking at technology and what can that do on some of these questions. So there’s some pretty cool technological things that we’re going to have developed and we’re going to be able to roll out at the conference. And there will be a concrete list of things that people are bringing to the table for this conference, and then a path for future things.

MR. BALTON: Not just the United States Government —

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Right.

MR. BALTON: — there will be announcements by other governments, other organizations we fully expect.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Right. And – right. And not just by governments, so —

QUESTION: And how many countries involved? How many —

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Over 80 countries will be here, and we’re going to have foreign ministers, we’re going to have environment ministers from those countries. And as I said we’re going to have NGOs from all over the world as well as business community. So – and then this will be livestreamed, so we’re hoping that all the people who have made these pledges to action, or a number of them, will be able to follow this live. And we’ve got this in an interactive way, so they’ll be able to actually feed questions in as the discussion goes on. We have put a premium on people showing rather than telling what the problems are, visually. So we expect this to be a very visually engaging conference as well, so that – I think it’s sometimes easier if you can just see the dead zone in the sea instead of just trying to imagine, for example, what that looks like.

QUESTION: Under Secretary, Juliet Eilperin with The Washington Post, can you both say first of all how many world leaders – have you now a final count of how many are coming? I know it’s a handful. And then the second question is: Clearly, the international community has tried to deal with climate change and had a number of problems in reaching it. And when you look at the oceans, more than half of it is on the high seas which isn’t in anyone’s exclusive economic zone. How do you think this can be different in terms of producing concrete results or a meaningful difference in a way we might not have seen through UN efforts on climate?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Well, I think – for example, for fish, I think there is already the capability, technologically, for example, to trace where boats are. And so whether they’re in the high seas or not, you can know where they are, and that allows you then to figure out how they – are they fishing in a place where they’re supposed to fish or not? So I think there are some —

QUESTION: But that’s not in place, that technology.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: The technology is not in place everywhere.

QUESTION: Right.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: It exists. And some folks are using it and some aren’t, and that’s one of the things we want to try to push forward here, and we want to try to push forward how other countries can make sure that these things are used. There is a new treaty that – out there called the Port-State Measures Agreement that sort of exhorts countries and gives them tools to actually implement this type of thing. So we’re looking at trying to get more signatories to that through this conference and also to get the technology pushed out and have a discussion about how that works – also on the U.S. side.

So I think – I guess what I would say is – maybe slightly different – is that there are actual solutions that people are putting in place in this realm today that can serve as catalysts to do it on a wider basis. And so we have the tools, and I think that that makes this in some ways very granular, and that means that you can attack it more easily. And I don’t know if “attack” is the right word, but solve these issues more easily.

So – and I will say, I mean, there has been a groundswell of support from the NGO community about this, and they also have a number of very tangible initiatives that they have been working on with foreign governments, which we hope to bring to fruition and we expect we will at this conference. So it’s a real partnership at many levels. And I haven’t honestly heard, as I’ve traveled around talking to governments about this, anybody who says this is an insoluble problem. There’s no one throwing up their hands saying this is just impossible and the politics of this are such that we can’t do it. I’ve heard people saying, okay, we can march forward here and we can figure out this path, and that we want to be on that frame. And that’s why we’re doing it this way.

In terms of world leaders, we expect to have many heads of state here, many are from the smaller island countries where this is vital to their health. But as I said, we’re also going to have quite a cadre of environment ministers and foreign ministers here, too.

QUESTION: But when you say “many,” can you give a range?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: I think in terms of – a hand of heads of state. I think it’s less than a dozen. I don’t have the final count.

MS. HARF: We can get some of those final numbers for you as well.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Yeah.

QUESTION: Okay.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Yeah, yeah.

MR. BALTON: Can I add one point to that? Would it be okay?

MS. HARF: Go for it.

MR. BALTON: So as someone who’s worked in this field for a long time, it is true, the solutions are out there. Often the missing ingredient has been political will, and what I see this conference as is a perfect opportunity to catalyze that will. That’s why we invited the types of people we did to this conference. We’re hoping to build political will towards these solutions.

QUESTION: I’m Suzanne Goldenberg from The Guardian. I know a few months ago there was talk with people from the Global Oceans Summit, David Miliband and (inaudible) – it was some of the ideas they were putting forward and there was consensus behind included a special police force of – a blue police force, sort of a water-borne version of blue helmets that would actually police the high seas – not necessarily boarding boats themselves, but using these kind of technologies that you mentioned. Is that something that the State Department would get behind?

And also would the State Department get behind a separate international organization for ocean how?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: I think – I guess what I would say is we think there is an awful lot already that’s out there in terms of organizations that are regulating fishing in particular. So I’m very aware of the great work that’s been done by David Miliband and that group of folks, and we expect several of the people who were the authors of that study to be at the conference. I – this – I have not, to be honest, heard of a police force of the high seas. That’s the first time I’m hearing of that. I think we’re – there are many mechanisms that are already in place, and I think the question is how do we get those to be optimal? And that’s what we’re looking at.

There can be also new things that if there’s a consensus around and we – that’s what we want to develop is a consensus. So I think that’s the best answer I can give you on that.

MS. HARF: Jo.

QUESTION: Jo Biddle from Agence France Presse. Hi, nice to meet you.

MR. BALTON: Nice to meet you too.

QUESTION: I wanted to ask about the possibility of expanding marine parks, particularly in U.S. borders. I believe some of the NGOs are saying this could be a major way that the United States could show leadership in this area. At the moment, about only – they estimate that – conservationists estimate that at least 30 percent of the oceans need to be covered by marine-protected areas. They’ve actually identified three specific areas of the United States – I’m sure, obviously, the Pacific atolls, the Marianas Trench, and the northwest Hawaiian Islands.

Do you anticipate that you will be making some announcements on this? Is this something that you would consider would be a good thing, and – or what are the problems of doing something like that? Does it impact with fishing, locals who are fishing, potentially, or something like that?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: So we absolutely believe that marine-protected areas are an important tool in conservation. And it’s – conservation’s important because you want to make sure that you have not just preservation of the environment, which is vital, but also you want to preserve fish so that the next generation of people who need to eat can do that. So marine-protected areas are important for many things; those are just two of them. We fully support marine-protected areas. We expect some announcements to come out of this conference, but we’re going to hold that until the conference. So —

QUESTION: And are you – kind of just to follow up, then, are you also pushing your partners around the world to do similar things on expanding marine parks?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Yes.

MR. BALTON: Yes.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: We absolutely are.

QUESTION: Okay.

QUESTION: Hi, I’m Matt Viser with The Boston Globe. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the Law of the Seas Treaty. And Secretary Kerry in the Senate was pushing for that in 2012 and it did not pass. How does any of this relate to what’s in that treaty? Should the U.S. still be pushing to sign that? Can you just —

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Well, you know that the President at his West Point speech talked about the Law of the Sea Treaty and the need to move that forward. We have been leading on – particularly in the fisheries – conservation area despite the fact that we have not ratified the Law of the Sea Treaty. And we’re looking at these other areas – ocean acidification – where there’s a lot of technology, et cetera.

So we are continuing to lead whether that treaty is ratified or isn’t ratified. That said, it is a very important treaty and the President has already said we need to look at getting to a place where we can ratify this. And so we will be taking that up.

QUESTION: Do you know when? I mean, is there a time element to that and when that treaty could be taken up, or when efforts to push the Senate to take it up again might —

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: People are talking about that internally and how we – it’s very important for economics, not just for conservation. It’s important for both things. And I think we need to make sure that that message is properly communicated to those who have to take the decision on whether they’re going to give their advice and consent. In terms of timing, I don’t have an answer for you on specific timing, but it is going to be something we’re going to work on.

QUESTION: Ian Urbina with The New York Times. Two questions: One, the UN agreement on biodiversity – will we hear much discussion of that and where the U.S. stands on it? And two, I know there are calls to expand the category of ships that are required to have AIS, especially fishing vessels more. Will that be an issue that gets discussed?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: So on the biodiversity, there is actually going to be a meeting going on in the UN at the same time as the conference, which the U.S. will be participating in. And I think this conference is really focusing on these kind of practical solutions, so I don’t expect we’re going to have a huge discussion of that, and that’s going to be going on in the UN, which is the proper forum for it to be going on. And your second question I’m going to defer to David, so —

MR. BALTON: So you’re right. There are requirements for many large vessels to have a variety of things, including AIS, and there is a – there are proposals out there in the – at the International Maritime Organization to expand the category of vessels that will be covered by these requirements, including more fishing vessels. And we do support that, yes. Whether it will happen anytime soon, I don’t know, but I expect it will come up at the conference as a step that we need to take.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Yes.

QUESTION: Neela Bannerjee with The Los Angeles Times. I wanted to return to something that Mr. Balton said about this being an opportunity to catalyze political will. Where are the areas specifically that you feel like political will is most lacking and that needs an extra push? That’s the first thing. And then the second question is: We’ve talked a lot about fishing and pollution, but what are some of the ideas that would be put forward to deal with the ocean acidification?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Mm-hmm. So I think political will is needed in all three of these areas. That’s why we picked them. So each area – overfishing, pollution of the ocean, which – a lot of the pollution of the ocean comes from runoff of fertilizer overuse as well as from plastics that don’t biodegrade, and so that is absolutely going to be discussed. And the third thing, ocean acidification, is obviously related to climate change. And in terms of that, one of the things that is true is that we don’t know everything about where – oh, the Secretary’s coming, so I will finish that after.

SECRETARY KERRY: Hi, folks. How are you all?

MR. BALTON: Morning.

SECRETARY KERRY: Hey, Marie, how are you?

MS. HARF: Good.

SECRETARY KERRY: Hi, Cathy.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Hi.

SECRETARY KERRY: Hi, everybody.

QUESTION: Hi.

SECRETARY KERRY: Good morning to you.

QUESTION: Good morning.

SECRETARY KERRY: I’ll run around and say hi to everybody.

(Introductions are made.)

MS. HARF: So everyone, as I said, this is all on the record. The Secretary will make some remarks, and then I think he probably has time for just a few questions. So no embargo.

SECRETARY KERRY: Absolutely. Great.

MS. HARF: I’ll turn it over to you, sir.

SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you, Marie. Thank you very much. Thanks, Cathy.

Well, let me begin by saying I am really excited by this conference which has been long in the making, since the moment I arrived here. In fact, I had wanted to do this when I was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and we began to plan some original efforts and then we ran out of time because they appointed me to something else. (Laughter.) So we just brought it over here and a few people like Marie and others to work on it.

The oceans are a passion of mine and always have been, from the time I was three years old or whatever and dipped my toes into Buzzard’s Bay and watched a lot of people from Woods Hole Oceanographic mucking around in the seaweed in the shallows getting specimens and doing research, and I began to wonder, sort of what is this all about? And for years and years, needless to say, have appreciated our oceans and have traveled many of them in the United States Navy across the Pacific on a ship, and went through Leyte Gulf and into the Philippines, and down to the Coral Sea and down to New Zealand and back through Samoa, and saw a lot of detritus and impacts of civilization, as we call it, on the ocean.

And then as chairman of the fisheries subcommittee in the United States Senate on the commerce committee, became deeply involved in protecting migratory species, dealing with tuna, with salmon, the Columbia River; with various laws that are supposed to regulate growth and development along the ocean border, like the Marine Mammal Protection Act or the Coastal Zone Management Act, the flood insurance, et cetera, which I rewrote as a senator. And I think I rewrote the Magnuson fisheries acts on several different occasions – not think, I know I did. (Laughter.) And then we rewrote them and changed them, working with Ted Stevens, who was a great collaborator with me on this when we were either chair or ranking member, et cetera. And we constantly were fighting to get additional science done, research money, and monitoring and other things, but I’m jumping ahead. Ted and I took the driftnet fishing to the United Nations. We managed to get driftnet fishing banned, ultimately, at the UN in the international process, though there are still some pirates out there who illegally fish and strip-mine the oceans, which is what they were doing.

So I learned during all of this process that a huge percentage of what fishermen fish is called bycatch and it’s just thrown overboard. Sometimes 50 percent or two thirds of a particular catch could actually be bycatch and thrown overboard. And through this process over the years, I became aware of this body of water we call the world’s oceans – ocean, which is actually 75 percent of Earth. The vast majority of Earth is not earth at all, it’s ocean. And some people have pointed out occasionally you could’ve called the planet Ocean rather than Earth. But we actually – according to some, and evolution – once spent a fair amount of time in the ocean. The – and much of the Earth’s surface was covered by the ocean that isn’t covered even today, as we all know from geology.

But what’s important to us today is that the ocean is the essential ingredient of life itself on the planet. In terms of oxygen, carbon dioxide, ecosystem, ocean currents, temperatures, life itself on Earth – if we did not have a 57 degree average temperature, which is what we had up until recent years, you wouldn’t have life the way we have it on the planet. And it is interacting deeply with the oceans and flow of the oceans. We depend on the oceans not just for oxygen and nutrients and protein, fish; there are – maybe 13 percent of the world’s population is completely dependent on the ocean for its input. But it also is essential to regulating climate around the planet, as well as major ecosystems. For instance, the Gulf Stream is an example of that.

Increasingly the ocean is threatened. The reason for this conference is very simple: The world’s oceans, as vast as they are, as much as they elicit a sense of awe for size and kind of power – they are under siege from a combination of acidification that takes place through the CO2 that falls into the ocean, which is changing ocean species and environment; it is under threat from pollution, a vast amount of pollution that spews off of land, flows down from places like the heartland of America, where farming practices wind up putting a certain amount of nutrients into the Missouri River, which flows into the Mississippi River – or any other river out of there, Ohio or otherwise – down into the Mississippi, out into the dead zone, which is now famous. Well, there are a bunch of dead zones around the world as a result of these things.

And ultimately, the third great danger is overfishing. Most of the world’s major fisheries are being overfished. Not all, but most. And some have a better process of regulation than others, but the problem with it is there’s a great debate over the science. There’s a great battle for who’s right and how do you base a regulatory rule on something if you don’t really know. And so there’s been always – I learned this firsthand in Massachusetts in our relationship with fishermen, that there’s this violent sense of injustice done when the regulators regulate, because the captains don’t believe the science on which the regulation is based. And so you have this disrespect, to some degree, and even flaunting in other instances, of the regulations. And most profoundly, you have a lack of monitoring and a lack of enforcement. So it’s all well and good to have some rule or regulation, but if it doesn’t get – if it’s not enforced, it’s like not having it at all.

So these are the problems we face, and we’re going to talk about this at a very well-attended, broadly represented conference that will have the prime minister* of Norway, the – Prince Albert of Monaco, the foreign minister of Chile, a number of government officials, a number of private sector entities, heads of major fishery corporations and Roger Berkowitz of Legal Sea Foods, an example – I mean, people who are stakeholders. We will have environmental and oceans experts, ocean scientists, a lot of visual presentation, a lot of presentation that people can really grab onto and understand. National Geographic, Cousteau Society, all these players are going to be involved in this conference that’s going to take place. It will be highly interactive and really give people an opportunity to be able to understand this.

I mean, part of it is an educational awareness-creating initiative, but it’s also – and this is very important – we didn’t want to just have a conference for the sake of it and have everybody talk and go away and not feel as if something can happen. And so building on other conferences – and there have been a lot of good conferences. I’ll give you an example. Jim Kim of the World Bank will be here and the World Bank’s been involved in this a little bit, and they’re making new policies in terms of how they can also help to protect the oceans and so forth. And we want to come out of it with an action agenda, and that’s our goal – is to set up a set of principles, declarations if you will, coming out of Washington, out of the Washington conference that can guide and impact choices on a global basis and build as we go into other conferences, which inevitably we’ll take in other meetings where we try to coalesce global action around this effort to protect the oceans.

That’s why I did that event when I was down in Bali with the fishermen down there. A huge percentage of fishermen – of Indonesians are fishermen. A huge percentage of the population there relies on the fish, and many of those fish come straight to Boston restaurants and New York restaurants and California. They’re huge suppliers to us, so it’s a global network. We’re all involved in it, and that’s the bottom line.

MS. HARF: Great, thank you. I think we have just time for two quick questions if folks are interested in typing.

SECRETARY KERRY: Anybody have a question?

MS. HARF: He answered everything.

SECRETARY KERRY: I answered everything. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: So quite a —

SECRETARY KERRY: Cathy will do in my absence. She’ll fill you all in, Marie, everybody.

MS. HARF: Let’s just do – did anyone – yeah, Juliet. Did you have one?

QUESTION: Well, I’m just wondering if you could say – just broadly, the U.S. traditionally has been a leader on this issue. There’s been plenty of people who would say in the last few years, whether you’re looking at whaling or climate or a number of things that other countries, including even small ones, have done things much more aggressively on the ocean than the United States. What do you think it would take beyond holding this conference to make the U.S. a leader in this? And given that much of this is going to be done through the President’s executive authority, what do you see are the possibilities and the limits to that given congressional resistance to some of it?

SECRETARY KERRY: Well, I would contest the notion that the U.S. hasn’t been a leader in this. I think we have been in our Magnuson Fisheries Act, in other efforts we’ve taken – I mean, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the flood insurance – we’ve done a lot of things to curb building, which other countries haven’t done. We’ve done a lot of things in terms of certain fisheries – manage them that other countries haven’t done. We do boast both Woods Hole Oceanographic and Scripps, two of the world’s premier research entities. So I think I’m not going to back off on our role, but we can do more. We can do better science, we can do better monitoring, we can do – we certainly could do better on climate change and emissions and so forth which have a profound impact on fishing.

But look, we’ve done a lot. We’ve done a lot with HFCs; we did a lot with acid rain. And there are other countries in Asia particularly that haven’t done enough on something like acid rain, and that has a profound impact on fisheries and so forth. So it’s a mixed bag and that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about here – who needs to do what, how, and what we can all do.

MS. HARF: Great.

SECRETARY KERRY: Okay.

QUESTION: Can you just talk – can you just give a couple —

MS. HARF: One more from Michele.

QUESTION: — maybe just a couple examples of what you hope to come out of this? I mean, I understand the action agenda, but how much money do you expect —

SECRETARY KERRY: We have a very solid action agenda. I think you’ve gotten some sense when I talk about monitoring or I talk about science. We obviously need to do more of both. There are other things we need to do, and we need to agree on fishing practice. I mean, there are a lot of things we need to do, and let’s let the conference sort of develop that, and it’ll unfold in the course of it, and that’ll make you have to come and pay attention to all of it. (Laughter.)

MS. HARF: Great. Thank you all so much and we’ll stay and answer some more questions.

SECRETARY KERRY: Great, all right. Thanks, everybody.

QUESTION: Thank you. Great.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: So you want me to finish?

QUESTION: Yeah.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: I was just on a separate vacation. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: No, I don’t even —

QUESTION: You kind of – you sort of talked about this too and I guess – I think what all of us are sort of getting at are the specifics within these three main priorities, right?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Right.

QUESTION: Like he mentioned, for example, runoff issues, right?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Right.

QUESTION: So – and you mentioned that too as well. So what are – if political will is lacking, then what are – like, what would you really like – like, say under each of these categories, right – the three categories – can you name two things that you would like to see action on, right? Is it runoff, is it pollution? What is it exactly?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Well, so on ocean acidification, one of the things that is really important there is, while we know the ocean is acidifying more, we don’t know – it’s not, like, uniformly doing that and it’s not doing that in a constant way. So we would like to see, for example, much more monitoring in a more thorough way so that, for example, shellfish farmers can have some early warning, if a big wave of acidification’s coming their way, that they could actually take some measures to mitigate that with their farms.

So that’s – those are some concrete things, and we actually have a shellfish farmer who is partnered with the state of Washington in this very – it’s a high-tech and low-tech way to be able to do just that. So part of that is figuring out mitigation, part of that is figuring out – as the Secretary said – what is the science and trying to set a baseline. So those are some concrete things in that space. Clearly there’s a whole climate change piece that’s going on in a separate place, and we’re not going to tackle that here because it’s already going on someplace else, but we’re sort of tackling what we can tackle at this moment.

On the fisheries side, I think that several of the issues – we’ve already highlighted what they are. How do you credibly trace where things are coming? What are the right regimes to have in place so that if your population says, “Is my seafood sustainably caught,” they can get a reliable answer – yes, that is? So we’re looking at that.

On the pollution side, I think there’s two aspects to it. One is: What are the scientific/technical things that need to be done to address this question of runoff? Are there things that can be done about how fertilizer is used, how it’s formulated, so that it is creating less of a problem when there’s some runoff into the waterways. Are there things that can be done on the science of plastic to make it more biodegradable? What can be done on recycling so that you’re actually having less things go into the ocean? So those are some specific things, and we’re trying to look at it that way.

QUESTION: So but, I mean, for example, with runoff, you’re having to deal with other federal agencies, right?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Mm-hmm.

QUESTION: I mean, don’t you have to deal with EPA, USDA?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Yes.

QUESTION: And I mean, as somebody who covers the environment, we have people who are really reluctant to go after Big Ag on anything. So how do you resolve that?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Right. Well, there’s all of the U.S. Government agencies that are involved in that are going to be here. We are also having folks involved in the industry here. And I don’t think we’re going to solve that as a huge problem and we’re not going to completely solve it at this conference. I think the idea though is that we can point the way to what we need to be doing very concretely so that things can progress and can be followed up on and can be measured. And that’s what we’re looking at trying to do.

QUESTION: Okay. I had one thing.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Yeah.

MR. BALTON: So just following up from what Secretary Kerry said in further answer to your question on fishing, which is clearly what I think he’s – thinks about most when he thinks about the oceans. Anybody who is looking at world fisheries would say there’s two big problems we need to find solutions. We need to end overfishing – and there are a lot of steps to take to do that. We’re actually doing a pretty good job in the United States on that, by the way. And while we may not be able to end illegal fishing totally, there are a lot of things we can do to stop illegally harvested fish from entering the stream of commerce. Those are two big things we really hope to drive forward in this agenda for fisheries at our conference.

QUESTION: What about whaling, since you mentioned that the prime minister of Norway is coming?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Well, we – there are lots of issues about whaling. We aren’t planning on having the conference focus on whaling per se, but we obviously oppose whaling that is not scientifically justified. And we urge countries to not engage in those practices.

QUESTION: Two questions. One I doubt you’ll answer. (Laughter.)

MS. HARF: I love when I get those in the briefing. (Laughter.)

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Boy, that’s nice of you to —

MS. HARF: I know.

QUESTION: My favorite color is blue. (Laughter.)

MS. HARF: Those are my favorite.

QUESTION: I hear a lot of griping within NOAA about enforcement cutbacks and budget cutbacks (inaudible). So that’s the one that – (laughter). The question, I guess, is will NOAA be there.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: NOAA will absolutely be there.

QUESTION: Is there any discussion of reversing the trend of funding cutbacks or enforcement cutbacks?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Well, NOAA will be there and they are fully supportive of this agenda. In fact, they’ve been very enthusiastic of working with us on this. So I guess that’s about as far as I can go.

QUESTION: Yeah. And then the other question, I guess, is magic pipe cases. And DOJ – over the last decade DOJ’s really been effective and aggressive in going after intentional polluting. So will there be a panel or something – some presentation that DOJ is going to put on about intentional dumping or magic pipe cases?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: I don’t – that wasn’t – no.

MR. BALTON: There’s nobody from DOJ presenting.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Yeah.

MR. BALTON: That topic is likely to be touched on. It’s not a problem only in the United States, right? So a lot of the speakers who are coming from other countries will describe their version of this issue.

QUESTION: Can I ask a Legal Seafoods question given that the Secretary brought that up?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Mm-hmm.

QUESTION: Their CEO is legendary for backpedaling on this and saying that he does not serve consistently sustainable seafood. It’s widely known he’s boycotted basically anyone who upholds sustainable seafood does not go to Legal Seafoods. So I guess obviously he could be giving a policy announcement that would change that, but I was just wondering if you could explain why someone who’s actually made his mark by questioning the value of only serving sustainable seafood would come to a conference on the oceans.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Well, we have to have everybody come here. I mean, we have to get everybody on the bandwagon to go in the right direction. And he’s well aware of the purpose of the conference, and so I think the fact that he’s chosen to come is – I have no understanding that he’s coming here to preach everybody should eat unsustainable seafood. (Laughter.) So I think actually we have been pretty clear about wanting folks who are coming with solutions to be here and to be speaking. And —

QUESTION: Does he have a speaking role?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: No.

MR. BALTON: No. But there are a lot of people in the – who are promoting sustainable seafood —

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: — who are coming.

MR. BALTON: — who are coming. Monterrey Bay has their card. The Marine Stewardship Council has – their processor, actually a proliferation of these, and virtually all of them are represented in our conference.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: And the CEO of Bumble Bee Tuna is going to be speaking. So —

QUESTION: And will Roger Berkowitz be listening to those people who are coming? (Laughter.)

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Well, if he didn’t want to listen to them, then I assume he wouldn’t have showed – I can’t speak for him, right? So you’ll have to ask them.

QUESTION: So is he just an attendee? I mean, he’s attending?

MR. BALTON: So there are almost 400 people coming to the conference. There are speaking roles for maybe 20 or 30, right? Just the way these conferences work.

QUESTION: Are there people you wish were coming who are – who couldn’t, who are either major violators or potentially good partners or both on some of these issues who are not coming?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: I think we’ve tried —

QUESTION: I mean representatives of countries or —

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: We tried to invite a very broad swath of folks. And when you have over 80 countries represented, that’s – I think we think that’s a pretty good swath of people. I don’t think we had anybody turn us down who we asked to come.

QUESTION: Really? So there’s not – there’s somebody – there aren’t certain empty places at the —

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: From countries.

QUESTION: Yeah. At the table that you wish were – if there’s somebody you – some country that you wish or some entity that you wish were represented and is not?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: No. Actually, no. I mean, this is a pretty robust group of attendees. And we – like I said, nobody turned us down. I mean, some individual people had scheduling conflicts, but in terms of the countries we are extremely represented across the whole globe.

MR. BALTON: India had an election just a few weeks ago.

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Right.

MR. BALTON: And so their new foreign minister was not – couldn’t make it on the schedule, but there will be Indians at the conference, just to give you an example.

QUESTION: As well as Chinese —

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Yes.

MR. BALTON: Yes. In fact, the head of the State Oceanographic Administration, Administrator Liu, will have a speaking role at our conference.

QUESTION: And Southeast Asia – are there people from there?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Yes, absolutely.

MS. HARF: A few more. Anyone? A few more last questions?

QUESTION: This is a novice question that’s not really important. But my understanding is that the European Union is on the cusp of deciding whether to impose some sort of ban on South Korean fish and that next year sometime the U.S. will be engaging in a similar analysis. That – so will that topic be part of next week’s discussion?

UNDER SECRETARY NOVELLI: Do you want to take that?

MR. BALTON: Yeah. So Maria Damanaki, who is the commissioner for the EU who does Maritime Affairs and Fisheries is coming. She actually also has a speaking role at our conference. And she’ll be talking about the – I assume – the EU’s approach to trying to prevent illegally harvested fish from entering their market.

We have our own approach to doing that that’s not entirely similar to the EU’s but maybe growing more similar over time. Yes, the EU is looking at Korea among other countries and maybe headed to a decision. I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her when she’s here. And we have our own process of going through fishing practices by other countries under the Magnuson-Stevens Reauthorization Act, and countries who are having vessels engage in these practices are put on notice by us and it can ultimately lead to trade sanctions against them.

MS. HARF: I think that’s all the time we have today. We will be doing a transcript of this, so I know you all took very good notes, but we will get you that as soon as it’s done. Any follow-ups, of course you know how to find me or anyone else in the Press Office. And we’re looking forward to next week. Thanks for coming today.

*foreign minister

Digital Canada 150 Launch

BusinessJune 10, 2014 admin

Speech Transcript

The Honourable James Moore, PC, MP
Minister of Industry

Waterloo, Ontario

April 4, 2014

Thank you, Peter [Braid, Member of Parliament for Kitchener—Waterloo], for the very kind and generous introduction. It is great to be here in Kitchener–Waterloo, an area of the country that really is seen as a source of inspiration for growth, technology, innovation and what it can mean for the Canadian economy.

And speaking of the Canadian economy, we did have some very good news today: Canada’s unemployment rate has now dipped below 7 percent. We’re at 6.9 percent. In the month of March, 43,000 jobs were created in the Canadian economy. So this is very good.

But we can’t just sit back and be satisfied with where we are today. We have to move forward, and we have to build a healthy and stronger country as we go forward.

And that’s why I’m here today because, you know, we are a country of nation builders. We are.

Back at the time of Confederation—back in 1881, in fact, just after Confederation—it was Sir John A. Macdonald who looked at this country, recognized the lessons of the past and said if we don’t build a railway from one end of this country all the way to the other, this country won’t long survive. He knew that, at the time, the next great nation building was to build a railway.

Since the building of the railway, of course, we’ve built ports, airports, the Trans-Canada Highway and some great national institutions. But you know, nation building isn’t just about looking backward; it’s about looking ahead.

So the question for us today is what’s next?

Well, what’s next for Canada is digital because nation building moving forward has to include a comprehensive, aggressive and thoughtful policy for a digital Canada.

So today, I am very pleased to be here to unveil Digital Canada 150, a comprehensive digital policy for Canada.

Digital Canada 150 is a bold plan to guide Canada’s digital future. It’s the result of submissions that came in from all across Canada. We had over 3,000 submissions from every region of the country. Ideas came in. We went through them, and we put together a comprehensive plan that will benefit this country going forward.

Digital Canada 150 sets clear goals of what Canada can achieve by the time we celebrate our 150th birthday in 2017. There are five pillars, 39 new initiatives and one national plan for 35 million Canadians.

So I’m just going to go through those five pillars now and talk about what’s in this plan.

The five pillars are:

Connecting Canadians;
Protecting Canadians;
Economic Opportunities of the Digital World;
Digital Government; and
Canadian Content.

The first pillar, Connecting Canadians, is about ensuring that Canadians across this country have access to wireless technologies and high-speed networks at the most affordable and competitive prices.

So what’s new in Digital Canada 150? Digital Canada 150 will connect over 98 percent of all Canadians with high-speed Internet services with download speeds of at least 5 megabytes per second. Canadian households, mostly rural and northern households, will have high-speed Internet access for the very first time.

And by the way, we often need to remind ourselves Canada is the second-largest country in the world in size, but 37th largest in terms of population. To achieve this goal of high-speed download services with the geographic footprint that Canada has is truly an impressive achievement. I can tell you that we will be working with the private sector as we move forward with our RFP process to map the entirety of Canada with high-speed Internet access. And when I’ve been in Europe and when I’ve been in other jurisdictions—even in South Korea, a country that’s smaller than the size of New Brunswick—when I say this to my counterparts, they’re blown away that a country of our size and population can achieve something as ambitious as this.

Also under Digital Canada 150, the Building Canada Fund, our infrastructure fund, will make digital projects eligible for program funding for the first time. So it’s not just roads and bridges and tunnels and rail crossings but also digital technology eligible for Government of Canada funding.

And we will unbundle television packages, so consumers can pick and choose the combinations of channels that they want, not those that are imposed on them.

And we’re also going to be capping domestic roaming fees on networks in Canada to increase competition and lower prices for Canadian consumers.

We’ve also created new rules for cell towers to ensure that communities have a say on where these towers are built and how they’re built.

And our wireless policy is delivering more choice at lower prices and better services for Canadian consumers in every region of the country.

The second pillar is Protecting Canadians. As we encourage more and more Canadians to go online in their personal lives, in their academic lives and in their business lives, we have to make sure that they have confidence that their online presence and their online transactions are secure, that their privacy is protected and that their families are safe from online threats and cyberbullying.

So that’s why in Digital Canada 150, we take a number of initiatives. For the first one, next week in Parliament, I will be tabling the Digital Privacy Act. This is an update to the PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) legislation that’s already on the books, which modernizes it for the new digital age. This new Digital Privacy Actwill give the Privacy Commissioner new powers and responsibilities to enforce and protect the privacy of individual Canadians as they venture increasingly online.

We also have before Parliament new cyberbullying legislation that will protect families from the invasion of privacy, the intimidation and often the personal abuse that is far too often seen online.

We will also make sure that our networks are protected from untrusted equipment. This has long been a topic on the international scene, and in Canada we’ve been lagging behind, but we will have legislation in Parliament and a new regime in place to ensure that our wireless and wired Internet services will be secure from terrorist threats, from asymmetrical threats and from symmetrical threats that pose a real risk to the integrity of our cyber systems.

And on July 1 of this year, Canada’s anti-spam legislation will come into full force, protecting Canadians and businesses from digital abuse online as well.

So Connecting Canadians, now Protecting Canadians online. The third of the five pillars is Economic Opportunities of the Digital World.

Digital Canada 150 has a number of new initiatives, including $200 million in new funding to help small and medium-sized businesses adopt digital technologies. And we will invest an additional $300 million in venture capital for digital companies across this country.

Digital Canada 150 will also invest $40 million to support 3,000 internships in high-demand fields all across this country. Canadian chambers of commerce have asked for this in regions all across the country to draw in the talent, to get those kids out of high schools who have great ideas, to give them experiences in the real world and to provide them with training and real world experiences. And we’re going to work with the private sector to make that happen.

We’re also increasing funding for the Canada Accelerator and Incubator Program to $100 million.

And we’re also going to provide support for the Institute for Quantum Computing.

And also not only on this macro scale and all this investment and all these partnerships, but also we’re doing meaningful things for small communities that often feel left behind in the digital age. We are putting forward $36 million in new money to repair and refurbish and donate computers to public libraries, not-for-profit organizations and Aboriginal communities in order to give students and young people—often for the first time—access to the digital world.

So Connecting Canadians, Protecting Canadians, Economic Opportunities of the Digital World, and now the fourth of the five pillars: a Digital Government of Canada.

It’s about us walking our talk when it comes to the digital world.

Many of you have been involved in the Canadian Open Data Experience and the appathon, which had over 900 app developers from across Canada use raw government data and the Open Data Portal to create apps. The experience was a fantastic one, led by Treasury Board President Tony Clement.

But beyond that, we want to build on that success and open up government to be more digital and accessible to Canadians. So we’re going to be modernizing the Government of Canada’s operations internally, catching up to the 21st century, finally, with one web presence and one consolidated email system across the entirety of the Government of Canada.

We’re also going to be creating the Open Data Institute, which involves many people in this room.

And we will develop Open Science to open public access to federally funded scientific research. You know, Canadians spend and invest millions of dollars through Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Health Canada and Industry Canada on all kinds of phenomenal scientific discoveries and research. And it’s not as easily accessible to Canadians as it ought to be. And through Open Science, we will be opening the doors and sharing that scientific information and research to academic institutions, to everyday Canadians, so that the scientific research and discovery doesn’t end with government but begins with access to this data.

And you know, once we achieve all these things of more open and digital government, once we connect Canadians, once we make the Internet more secure and once we’re really on the leading edge of making Canada a leader in the digital economic opportunities, what’s next? Canadian content.

And this is what gets me, frankly, most inspired. For five and a half years I was Canada’s Minister of Canadian Heritage and arts and culture and official languages.

And so you know, once you connect Canadians and you make it secure and you’re taking advantage of the economic opportunities, and government is walking its talk in the digital world, now comes the fun stuff, the important stuff of telling Canadian stories to one another as we go into our 150th birthday in 2017. And Digital Canada 150 has a number of new initiatives to take advantage of that, to talk about Canada in the way that we should in the digital age.

For example, we’re going to be supporting new Heritage Minutes as we move forward every year now towards our 150th birthday.

The Canadian Museum of History, the largest museum in all of Canada based in the national capital, will have more digital content than ever before. We’re investing $25 million to refurbish and rebuild the institution, with a clear mandate to focus on more digital content than ever before.

As well, virtualmuseum.ca, it exists, but we wish more Canadians would see it. More Canadians will now see it because it will be sistered with and led by the Canadian Museum of History, and its content will be made available to more Canadians than ever before.

We’ve also supported key projects to ensure that digital creators have access to markets around the world by merging the Canadian Television Fund and the Canada New Media Fund into the Canada Media Fund, and making it an A-base project for the Government of Canada. It is being backed by $100 million in new funding every single year to support apps and video games, television shows, documentaries and shorts, which will be made available on digital platforms, engaging the entire the world. It is a remarkable accomplishment and an important ingredient to ensuring that Canadian digital content is available all across Canada and indeed around the world.

I’ll just deviate from script here for a minute. It’s a sad stat, but it’s an important one: in only 4 of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories is it necessary for a child to take a history class in order to graduate from high school—4 out of 13. And often, what’s called history in these classrooms is not what one would call a robust understanding and deep appreciation of the fullness of Canadian history.

Well, we as a federal government—education is a provincial responsibility—but we as a federal government and the private sector and institutions that exist out there, we can work together and do better than that.

We’re creating the Canadian Museum of History, but we have to make sure that all of our museums in the vastness of this country—second largest in the world in size, 37th largest in population—we need to make sure that all of our institutions are sharing Canadian history, telling Canadian history, so we can learn from one another and build and grow and stay united as we go forward to our 150th birthday.

But better than that, it’s not even just about telling Canadian stories of the past, it’s about dreaming and thinking of the future. It’s about young kids. You know, I know that those of you who work here at OpenText and those who work at RIM and those who work at the universities in Waterloo and Kitchener, all of you who are engaged in the digital world.

We all know that the digital universe doesn’t begin when you’re handed your first Q10 or you’re given your first iPad or you’re given your first Samsung. We know that it begins when you’re three and four feet tall, when you to go a museum and you see performing arts and you’re exposed to music, and those synapses in the brain fire at a very young age and those creative centres are stirred when you’re young. And your creative engine is fired up for lifelong learning in the creative arts, which spills over into the digital world, which spills over into the digital economy, which spills over into the overall economy, which creates the best quality of life in the world for Canada. That’s what’s we’re doing. That’s what we’re doing in supporting digital content through the Government of Canada and Digital Canada 150.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. This has been in the works for a very long time. We’ve worked very hard to ensure that we have a digital policy, Digital Canada 150, that works for all of Canada.

There are five pillars to Canada’s digital economy strategy:

connecting Canadians for the future;
protecting Canadians online;
making sure we take advantage of the economic opportunities;
making sure that government is walking its talk, that we’re more digital than ever before; and
supporting Canadian content with new initiatives in the digital world.

Five pillars, 39 new initiatives, one national policy for 35 million Canadians. That’s Digital Canada 150.

I really appreciate your attention and your involvement in this debate. As we move forward, Canada will benefit from this. We will all benefit from a comprehensive policy that makes sure that we take full advantage of the digital world that lies in front of us.

Thank you all very much.

Commission points to innovation reforms to sustain economic recovery

BusinessJune 10, 2014 admin

European Commission

Press release

Brussels, 10 June 2014

Commission points to innovation reforms to sustain economic recovery

The European Commission has today highlighted the importance of research and innovation (R&I) investments and reforms for economic recovery in the European Union, and made proposals to help EU Member States maximise the impact of their budgets at a time when many countries still face spending constraints. Increasing R&I investment is a proven driver of growth, while improving the efficiency and quality of public R&I spending is also critical if Europe is to maintain or achieve a leading position in many fields of knowledge and key technologies. The Commission has pledged support to Member States in pursuing R&I reforms best suited to their needs, including by providing policy support, world-class data and examples of best practice.

Olli Rehn, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro, said: “The European economic recovery is gathering speed while the pace of fiscal consolidation is slowing down, in line with the EU’s reinforced fiscal framework. Nonetheless, budgetary constraints will remain, which is why.it is more important than ever that Member States target their resources smartly. The EU budget is helping drive growth-enhancing investment in research and innovation and today we are putting forward ideas to help maximise the impact of every euro spent.”

Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, said: “Fostering innovation is widely accepted as the key to competitiveness and better quality of life, especially in Europe where we cannot compete on costs. This is a wake-up call to governments and businesses across the EU. Either we get it right now or we pay the price for years to come.”

The Communication published today highlights three key areas of reform:

Improving the quality of strategy development and the policy-making process, bringing together both research and innovation activities, and underpinned by a stable multi-annual budget that strategically focuses resources;
Improving the quality of R&I programmes, including through reductions of administrative burdens and more competitive allocating of funding;
Improving the quality of public institutions performing research and innovation, including through new partnerships with industry.

The Commission has also called on Member States to prioritise R&I, as public authorities regain margins for growth-enhancing investment. With current R&I spending across the public and private sector worth just over 2% of GDP, the EU remains well behind international competitors like the United States, Japan and South Korea, with China also now very close to overtaking the EU (see graph). Increasing R&I spending to 3% of GDP therefore remains a key target for the EU, but the Communication today shows that improving the quality of public spending in this area is also essential in order to increase the economic impact of investment. The Communication points equally to the need for the EU needs to put in place the right framework conditions to encourage European companies to innovate further.

Public and private R&D intensity in 2012 in the EU and some third countries

Background

Innovation is central to economic growth and business competitiveness, and is at the heart of the EU’s Europe 2020 strategy. Today’s proposals follow those of the 2014 Country Specific Recommendations where a number of Member States received recommendations to reform their research and innovation policies. The Commission has also issued today a State of the Innovation Union report demonstrating progress against the 34 commitments made and highlighting the need for further efforts.

The EU budget for 2014-20 marks a decisive shift towards R&I and other growth enhancing items, with a 30 % real terms increase in the budget for Horizon 2020, the new EU programme for research and innovation. A further EUR 83 billion is expected to be invested in R&I as well as SMEs through the new European Structural and Investment Funds.

Innovation Union: http://ec.europa.eu/research/innovation-union/index_en.cfm

Horizon 2020: http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/

MEMO/14/405

The Honourable Jason Kenney delivered a speech at Polytechnics Canada’s 2014 annual conference

BusinessJune 4, 2014 admin

DATE: May 7, 2014

LOCATION: Algonquin College – Ottawa Campus, Ottawa, Ontario

SUBJECT: Minister of Employment and Social Development Jason Kenney delivers a speech recognizing the work at polytechnics to ensure graduates have the skills employers need at Polytechnics Canada’s 2014 annual conference “The Future We Want, the Difference We Make.”

Hon. Jason Kenney: I think the work that Polytechnics Canada and all of its member colleges represented by you here tonight is in many ways the most important work being done in the Canadian post-secondary education sector. And that’s really what I’m here to talk about tonight.

Algonquin College represents 159 college programs, with 21 apprenticeship programs and 61 online programs, to name just three from an impressive list of what’s offered at this college, typical of all the polytechnics across Canada.

Now let me just begin my remarks by situating them in the kind of context of Canada’s economy. Of course, up on Parliament Hill we have our partisan debates about our strengths and weaknesses, but fundamentally, I think we can all recognize that the Canadian economy is doing pretty well—in fact, significantly better than most other developed economies. The recession, the global downturn here was shorter and shallower than in virtually any other developed democracy, and the recovery has been stronger, with the creation of some 1.1 million net new jobs since the 2009 downturn— the overwhelming majority of them—about 90 percent of them—being full-time jobs, and 80 percent of them in high-wage industries.

We have one of the strongest fiscal positions in the developed world, with one of the lowest levels of debt, of public indebtedness at the federal level in the developed world. We’re going to have a balanced federal budget next year, and a number of provinces moving to balance—at relatively low tax levels for our history. In fact, the federal tax take as a share of our Gross Domestic Product is at its lowest level since the mid-1960s. And still that word has not got out very well around the world, and people still have this brand idea of Canada as a high-tax jurisdiction and a country that not too long ago was a bit of fiscal basket case.

Well, we have turned that around, and we now have the lowest taxes in the world on new business investment, at least amongst the major developed economies of the world.

Bloomberg just last week ranked Canada for I think the third straight year as the best country in the world in which to do business. The World Economic Forum says we have the strongest financial sector or the strongest banks. And the good news goes on and on. And these are things about which we should be grateful, but with all of those strengths come certain challenges.

But first, you know, the future’s looking even brighter—brighter because Canada, as you know, has always been an export-driven economy and we are diversifying our export markets in important ways. For far too long, of course, we have been over- dependent on the United States as virtually a captive market for our goods and services, but we are diversifying, having moved from 4 to 43 free trade agreements in the past 6 years, including trade agreements with the European Union, 28 member states representing 500 million consumers, largely in highly developed economies. And we will be the first jurisdiction in the world with simultaneous, basically tariff-free access to the market of 300 million people in the United States and the 500 million people in the European Union.

To that, we are adding, we hope, market free access to one of the most dynamic and the most innovative economies in Asia, that of South Korea, which will begin accelerated Canadian market access to these enormous and growing Asian economies.

So altogether, things are looking bright from a fiscal point of view. We’re doing relatively well in our domestic economy. Our export markets are opening up. And on top of all of that, we are on the cusp of what some people are calling a new industrial revolution in Canada’s economy that is a result of the hundreds of billions of dollars of capital investments that are coming on stream in extractive industries in a huge swath of northern Canada.

From the offshore oil and gas in Newfoundland to heavy minerals in Labrador to precious metals in northern Quebec, mining operations in northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire, to new hydro developments in Manitoba, potash and uranium in Saskatchewan and hydraulic fracturing in southern Saskatchewan, resulting in an energy boom there, to of course our bitumen reserves, oil, gas and other resources in Alberta, new mining developments in northern B.C. and all across the three northern territories opening up new horizons of opportunity, especially for our First Nations people, our Aboriginal people who happen to be proximate to so many of those huge new investments.

And by the way, each one of those developments, every one of those mines, every one of those projects of course is a public policy challenge. We have to make sure all of those things happen in a way that is environmentally sustainable and responsible. But if even a relatively small fraction of these prospective investments proceeds, we are talking about the creation of hundreds of thousands of high-paying, high-quality jobs primarily in skilled trades and vocations. And the challenge, as you know, is that our education systems have not been preparing young Canadians for those kinds of jobs in adequate numbers.

Now this is the big challenge that we will be facing. If there’s one reason that we are unable to fully grasp the potential offered by this “new industrial revolution,” it will be because we don’t have an adequate number of people with the right skills to actually fuel that prosperity.

Now let me be clear about this. This is a subject of some debate these days. As I’ve said as long as I’ve been in this position, Canada does not have a general labour shortage. The data doesn’t support it. If we did, we’d see wage rates rising more quickly than they are. But I think it’s undeniable if you actually look at the lived experience, the reality on the ground, if you listen to what employers and their representatives are saying from coast to coast to coast, that we are facing significant and acute skill shortages in certain regions and industries.

Let me give you some of these estimates. The construction sector says they will need 319,000 new workers in the next decade. The mining industry of Canada says they’ll need 145,000 more workers by 2020. The petroleum sector estimates they need 130,000 workers—additional workers—by 2020. And Skills Canada, which is, as you know, a great organization that we support, promoting the trades, tells us that we’re going to need a million skilled trade workers by the end of this decade. And the list goes on, whether it’s the Conference Board or the Chamber of Commerce, all of them estimating significant shortages, particularly in skilled trades.

So our challenge will be to fix the paradox of too many Canadians without jobs in an economy that has a growing number of jobs without Canadians.

And by the way, this isn’t a flash in the pan. It’s not based on anecdotal views. This is not just the data. This is also very obvious and intuitive when you understand that baby boomers are beginning to retire. We have a growing economy. The economy is growing most quickly in areas with sparse population through much of northern Canada where the extractive industries are located, and they tend to be in occupations which our education system has been under serving.

And by the way, you know, some of the demographers and economists tell us not to worry too much about the aging of our society and the retirement of the baby boomers—the demographic bulge—because they say people are working longer, and that’s true—for white collar workers. But for folks who are engaged in tough manual labour every single day, guess what? They’re not going to be working as welders and as carpenters and as heavy equipment operators into their 70s in work camps in northern Canada.

So let’s be realistic about this. These are occupations where we are going to see an entire generation of highly skilled Canadians—they have already begun—leaving these occupations. That pace is only going to accelerate. And regrettably, in part because of problems in our apprenticeship systems, we don’t have adequate opportunities for them to transmit their knowledge and learned experience to younger generations.

So for me, this is a matter of some urgency, and solving it requires movement on the part of the federal government, provincial governments, employers, industry associations, unions, educators, trainers in all different sectors.

Ces difficultés sont importantes mais nous comptons sur des personnes très compétentes pour trouver des solutions, particulièrement personnes comme ceux comme vous ici aux Polytechniques Canada.

And I want to thank Nobina, Ken and their whole team at Polytechnics here in Ottawa for playing an integral role in helping us address these challenges.

Vous vous proposez en vous appuyant sur des recherches et des données probantes des idées qui retiennent l’attention des décideurs au sein du gouvernement fédéral.

You challenge my officials to update their thinking on the changes underway in the Canadian education system, and I’m the first to admit that Ottawa doesn’t always have the answers. That’s why we appreciate the valuable input and the challenge function that Polytechnics Canada provides.

Let me give you just one very pressing example of what I’m talking about. The centrepiece of the most recent federal budget was called the Canada Apprenticeship Loan. The idea with the Canada Apprenticeship Loan is that apprentice students, when they’re doing their formal block training, will be able to apply for and obtain interest-free financing through the Canada Student Loan Program. Students will be able to apply for up to $4,000 in interest-free loans. It’s estimated that at least 26,000 apprentices a year will benefit from this. It’s just one of the things that we have to do to break down this ridiculous idea that skills and vocational training and applied learning are somehow second-tier or second-class forms of education.

And guess what? The idea of the Canada Apprenticeship Loan came directly from Polytechnics Canada. In fact, I recall exactly the moment when. I had only been in my current post for a few weeks, and I heard about this whirlwind of ideas and energy, Nobina Robinson. Everyone told me I had to meet her. She had the solutions to the skills challenges that Canada was facing.

So we arrange a meeting for Nobina, and she came in, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise for an entire hour, as you might imagine, which was just fine because she downloaded a brilliant analysis of the challenges that we’re facing in our post-secondary education system, and some fantastic solutions. And she said, “Why is it, Minister, that we give preferential loans, supported by the federal government, to students engaged in full-time academic studies at degree-granting universities, but we leave the apprentices out in the cold?”

And I looked at that, and I thought, you know, here we have a problem. We’ve got—thankfully—a growing number of young Canadians registering in apprenticeship programs. We’re now up to about 340,000. Well, that’s good news. The bad news is only half of them are going on to completion. We have an apprenticeship completion problem in this country. And I believe one of the reasons is because the opportunity cost for young people to leave their good-paying jobs as apprentices and go and do their formal block training is significantly high.

You know how it is. If you’re a young fellow in your early 20s in a welding apprenticeship program, and you’re working up in the oil sands in northern Alberta making 35 or 45 dollars an hour, well, first of all, you know how young people are. Their spend rate, their burn rate automatically goes to their amount of money—to consume every dollar that they’re generating, right? Young fellows in their 20s are not famous savers.

And so they kick up their spend rate, and they’ve got the lease on the new truck, and they’ve got the nice new apartment. And they’re spending every dollar that comes in. And the idea of suddenly going cold turkey for two months, so they can go down to SIAST or NAIT or BCIT and do their block training, suddenly is a very expensive and risky one. And so all the incentives are just to keep working and generating the income and to kick the apprenticeship can down the road.

Well, we have to soften the blow for them. We have to create the incentives for them to actually get to that journeyman Red Seal certification, so that they have that level of formal skills that they can transmit to others.

And a number of things need to be done in this area. First of all, we’ve brought in a policy that allows employers to pay those folks on their block training up to 95 percent of their regular salary level on top of employment insurance benefits, with no penalty. So the responsible employers can keep their apprentice employees whole during their block training. Point one.

Point two. We’ve now in this budget launched the Canada Apprenticeship Loan, which gives them a financing option to get through that period, as well to cover living expenses and other related expenses to reduce the opportunity cost.

And point three, in the budget, we’ve also launched a pilot project to support innovative ways of delivering the block training online and through remote learning, so that perhaps some of these people can stay in the remote work sites where they’re located and actually take their block training in smaller increments over weekends and evenings and through creative delivery of those programs. I know a number of you are doing that already.

Now this stuff isn’t terribly exciting. None of these ideas make it to the front page of the Globe and Mail, and I don’t think, Nathan, we’ve actually had a single question in the House of Commons on the Canada Apprenticeship Loans—probably a good thing— because I think there’s actually consensus around it.

By the way, political journalists—I’ll let you in on a secret, they’re actually fight promoters. So if there’s no fight on the issue, there’s nothing to report. But these are great ideas. And guess what? It was Polytechnics Canada, it was Nobina who came, and she said we’ve been trying to push this for years, but no one will listen. Well, someone finally did. And I’ll be honest, we encountered a certain resistance. I think the resistance was because before, you had to have 10 weeks of class in an accredited program in order to qualify for the Student Loan Program, and we didn’t want to water that down, we didn’t want to dilute it.

But you know, I think there was an unconscious bias behind that policy decision. And the unconscious bias was that apprenticeship learning isn’t really the equivalent to university education. And when I heard that argument offered, that’s what pushed me over the line. And I said, look, that’s exactly why we need to do this. We need to it not just to facilitate some financing options for young apprentices, so they complete their programs. We need to do it, just as importantly, in order to send a symbolic signal that the federal government regards apprenticeship learning in the trades as every bit as valuable as going to university in an academic program, and that’s what the loan says.

So thank you for the constructive role that you play.

Now another solution to this challenge of the future skills gap is to take a long and hard look more broadly at our secondary and post-secondary education systems.

Let me start by using Polytechnics Canada as an example of what I’m talking about. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, by the way, I’m a big fan of Polytechnics Canada and the work that your colleges do. And let me explain why I’m a fan.

Across Canada, you have 280,000 students enrolled in 11 institutions across 55 campuses. You offer a wide range of programs—a hundred stand-alone degrees, 24 joint degrees, 754 diplomas, 558 certificates, 200 graduate certificates and 225 apprenticeship programs.

What unites students across those different streams of learning is that they get good jobs. Some 90 percent of polytechnics students in Canada are employed after six months, and some of those coming out of the degree programs, it’s much higher. How many other educational institutions can boast numbers like that? Well, frankly, we don’t know, and that’s part of the problem, isn’t it?

Interestingly, polytechnic schools are increasingly becoming a finishing school for general arts and science bachelor degree holders. Forty-six percent of your students have partially completed some kind of university or college training before enrolling at a polytechnic institution. Twelve percent of your students have actually completed a bachelor’s degree, and another 15 percent a college diploma or certificate before enrolling.

Students are flocking to your institutions. And by the way, I know you’re turning away far more than you can accommodate. They’re flocking to your institutions because of your small class sizes, your hands-on training on equipment used in industry, your teaching by industry-experienced faculty, and your integrated learning through placements, co-ops and internships—in other words, through applied learning. And of course, there’s also that 90 percent employment rate I mentioned before. As the jobs minister, I kind of like that.

The case outlined above demonstrates that the polytechnic model is hugely successful and the exact type of programming that governments should be supporting far more vigorously than they currently are.

That’s why it’s so frustrating to me when I hear that provincial government funding for polytechnic colleges isn’t keeping up with funding for other forms of post-secondary education. Between 2008 and 2013, the number of prospective students—people aged 20 to 34—in provinces with polytechnic institutions has increased by over 9 percent, all right? At the same time, federal government transfers to the provinces for post-secondary education through the Canada Social Transfer have increased by nearly five percent annually over the same period. So your prospective clientele’s grown by nine percent. The federal funding to the provinces has grown by five percent—sorry, we haven’t kept up with your population growth—but here’s the catch. Provincial funding to polytechnics through your operating budgets has only increased by 2.8 percent over the same period. And so there’s something fundamentally wrong with that. Provincial funding as a percentage of your operating budgets has actually decreased by an average of 2.9 percent.

So to summarize my point, employers from across Canada tell us that there is a current and growing demand for skilled workers in the very fields that your institutions are training young Canadians for. You’re producing a 90 percent employment rate—more than that in certain programs. And you’re clearly tremendously successful at knowing what jobs are in demand today, preparing graduates for those jobs. And yet your share of provincial support is not keeping up with the funds that the federal government is giving to provinces for post-secondary education. I want to know, where is our money going? And I think the federal government has a right to know that question.

It’s not our business to administer post-secondary education. We acknowledge – nous – évidemment, nous reconnaissons entièrement la juridiction constitutionnelle des provinces et territoires quant à l’éducation, y compris l’éducation postsecondaire.

Cela étant dit, en temps qu’une source des fonds importants pour l’éducation postsecondaire, d’après moi, le gouvernement fédéral a le droit au moins à poser les questions d’où vont les investissements des contribuables fédéraux?

At the very least, while we respect provincial jurisdiction in the areas of education policy—as a major funder, I believe the Government of Canada has every right to ask why those dollars that we are increasing to provinces for post-secondary education are not finding their ways into the budgets and programs delivered by Canada’s polytechnic institutions.

Go ahead and applaud. I won’t turn you in to your provincial ministers, I promise.

I’m meeting with those provincial ministers, my Forum of Labour Market Ministers this summer, and make no mistake: I am putting this on the table. The next time the provinces ask me to spend more on post-secondary education or they ask us to increase their allotment for immigration or bring in more temporary foreign workers or what have you, I’m going to tell them that I expect to see money move to where results are in our education and training systems. That means moving money to polytechnics.

Now this is just one area of our secondary and post-secondary system that needs to be reviewed. We also need of course to do a better job of making a compelling case to young Canadians to consider a future in apprenticeship programs, in applied learning and in the skilled trades in particular.

For too long, we’ve settled for this kind of one-size-fits-all approach to youth employment, which has essentially been to tell young people to stay in school for as long as they can while in many ways frowning on vocational schools and apprenticeship training.

Provincial governments need to realize that the choices they made in the 1970s and 80s to downgrade vocational education were shortsighted. Forty years ago, most high schools offered vocational training. But for some reason, provincial education ministries and school boards decided to push vocational and skills training to the margins. In the 1990s, York University found that the number of technology courses taken by secondary school students in Ontario dropped from 480,000 in 1973 to 257,000 in 1996. Now it would be very interesting to see more recent data because all of the indications are that number has plummeted even further.

And that’s made worse still by the burden of debt incurred from staying in school longer, doing as they were told to do and then struggling afterward to find a good-paying job.

Let’s bear in mind, however, that some countries have fared significantly better than Canada—such as European countries—when it comes to connecting education and training to jobs in the labour market.

And that’s precisely why in March of this year, I led a study mission, which included Polytechnics Canada. Ken was there and Larry from SIAST attended together with all of the major Canadian business organizations, some of our largest unions and representatives from five of our provincial governments. And in Germany, we saw their phenomenal vocational training system. Now you all know about it; it’s almost mythic in its international reputation. And let me begin with the usual caveat. Of course we cannot replicate the German system, rooted as it is in hundreds of years of the guild system and their particular political legal system. We can’t replicate it. But what we can do is learn from it.

And here’s what I learned. I learned that nearly two-thirds of young Germans at the average age of 16 go into paid apprenticeship programs, typically with three and a half days on the work site, where an employer is paying them a good stipend of a thousand euros a month and then a day and a half in a vocational college, where they’re learning the applied theory of the skills they’re developing on the work site.

And I learned that on average those German apprenticeship programs are completed in three years. They’re graduating with their certificate, on average, at the age of 19, and 95 percent of them are going into employment in the field for which they were trained without student debt, with practical work experience, with a certificate that has equal value in every corner of their country, of their federation, and a certificate which is considered by everyone as having the same educational, social and economic value as a university degree. And that was perhaps the core learning that we had.

You know, that wasn’t just the advocates of the trades saying this. It wasn’t just the employers or the unions saying that. It was the academics themselves. I must admit I was astonished to hear one of the leading scholars of the German education system, a fellow with two PhDs, express how concerned he was to see a growing percentage of young Germans going into academic university programs as opposed to apprenticeship trades programs. I’d love to meet an academic in Canada who would share the similar sentiment.

And maybe this is why the German unemployment rate for youth is about half of our unemployment rate for young Canadians.

Of course a key part of the German system is the sense of responsibility amongst employers to contribute. German employers contribute the equivalent of 49 billion Canadian dollars per year in apprenticeship programs alone. And that contrasts rather unfavourably to private sector investments in skills development here in Canada.

You know the numbers. We have the highest level of public sector state-supported investments in skills development in the OECD. But we are the bottom of the developed world when it comes to how much companies, the private sector, put into skills development. So we need to find ways to prime the pump to encourage our employers to take up the challenge.

You know I was recently at the B.C. Business Summit. All the major employers in British Columbia were there. And every time I meet with these guys they say to me they need temporary foreign workers, they need more immigration numbers, they need to address the labour challenges in those ways. And I say to them, listen, I don’t want to ever hear you coming talking to me again about labour shortages and skills gaps unless and until we see demonstrable increases in private sector investments in skills training and preparing young people for the jobs of the future.

Now to give the employers their due, many employers are star performers, and many of them do participate. Many of them sponsor programs in your colleges and help you acquire new capital equipment for training—and I think we’re beginning to turn the corner on this. I think employers understand they have to put more skin in the game.

This, by the way, was really the idea, the motive idea behind our Canada Job Grant, an idea that became unnecessarily controversial, but we’ve since reached agreement with all provinces and territories for them to deliver this Job Grant. The idea was actually radically simple in a way. It was picking up the Germanic idea of employer-led training and investment in training initiatives. This is a particular challenge for small and medium-sized businesses.

When we ask SMEs in Canada why they don’t put more money into training, why they don’t hire more apprentices, they tell us it’s because they are terrified of poaching. For an SME to spend thousands of dollars putting a young person through a diploma program or tens of thousands through an apprenticeship program as an indentured apprentice, only to find that person, as soon as they’re certified, poached by a major employer with deeper pockets and a bigger payroll, that’s a very serious point of exposure for small businesses.

The idea behind the Job Grant is simply to reduce that exposure for them, so that they can identify young people or a group of people for a specific training program, at the end of which they have a guaranteed job, but we’ll come in and support roughly two-thirds or as much as three-quarters of the training costs. They have to put some skin in the game. They have to be involved in recruiting the individual. They have to guarantee them a job and hopefully mentor them through the process. We hope this will begin to replicate some of the magic in the German training system.

You know, it’s not just in Germany. We also visited the United Kingdom, whose system, for various obvious historical reasons is closer to our own. But here’s the interesting thing. The UK went through very much the same kind of single-minded focus on academic post-secondary education in the 1980s. And they’ve begun to try to reverse the momentum back towards applied learning. In the 1980s their polytechnics all graduated to degree-granting universities essentially. And now they’re trying to build up the college sector doing vocational training, doing apprenticeship programs with teenagers, so that, again, they’re coming out before they’re 20 with valuable skills and typically very good employment prospects.

And did you know that in the United Kingdom someone who does an apprenticeship program makes $275,000 more in Canadian dollars over their lifetime than those that graduate with a university degree.

By the way, we need comparable data here in Canada. We simply don’t have it. And some of the data being used in this debate is, shall we say, more than a little misleading. To compare the outcomes of all university grads in Canada, many of whom are boomers in their peak earning years, many of who are in the highest paying professions, to compare that aggregate average with everyone else is an irrelevant comparison.

But let’s begin comparing the employment earnings of, I don’t know, sociology majors to welders. Let’s begin comparing the outcomes for bachelors in communications with power engineers. If we actually begin doing more disaggregated real world comparisons, then we have some data that’s useful to share with young people.

Now don’t get me wrong. I have to make this disclaimer. We do not—I do not for a moment seek to denigrate the enormous value of academic post-secondary education that’s offered by our universities or the humanities or the liberal arts, all of which are enormously valuable and most of which programs lead to great outcomes. But what I am suggesting is that what we must begin doing in Canada is to replicate what in Europe they call the parity of esteem between different forms of education, training and employment. We must stop sending cultural cues to young people through their high school counsellors, their parents, their governments that they are somehow failing or not realizing their potential if they pursue a technical vocation or trade. We need to clearly and at every opportunity indicate that the choice of going to a Canadian polytechnic and working in a technical vocation is every bit as valuable as going to university and getting an academic degree.

There’s a whole lot more we have to do, but I’ve spoken long enough. Let me just perhaps summarize it by saying that the Government of Canada is trying to play its role to create the right incentives, to send the right signals. For example, we created the Apprenticeship Incentive Grant and the Apprenticeship Completion Grant, which, together, represent $4,000 available to students who go through their apprenticeship programs. We’ve created the Apprenticeship Hiring Grant for employers to incentivize them to do the same. We created the Tools Tax Credit.

And by the way, we’ve reformed the immigration system to try to support skilled people in these kinds of vocations. You know, since the early 1970s, Canada basically closed its immigration system to blue-collar immigrants, people who work in the trades. We opened a new door in the Skilled Trade stream of our immigration system and through our Provincial Nominee programs in the last few years. These are highly skilled people who can come in as permanent residents and be the journeymen to take on apprentices. We need to reduce journeymen-apprenticeship ratios in those provinces where they are unrealistically high to allow smaller contractors to take aboard apprentices.

We need harmonization in the apprenticeship programs across the country. The New West Partnership in Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C. is doing this. The Atlantic provinces are, with our support. It would be nice to see the two central Canadian provinces get with the program.

We of course need to continue knocking down the remaining barriers to interprovincial labour mobility and to mutual recognition of trades and professions. And we need to do more to recognize the skills of foreign-trained professionals and tradespeople who are too often under-employed in our economy.

And of course we must all continue to focus particularly on those groups in our population like young Aboriginal Canadians who are massively under-represented in the workforce.

So these are big challenges, but the good news is I believe we’ve begun to see a significant change in the debate and the allocation of resources. The recent announcement by the Government of British Columbia that they’ve begun reengineering their secondary and post-secondary education systems, that they want to track labour market outcomes from all of the PSE streams and they want dollars to follow results is extremely good news. This is a model that can and must be replicated right across the country.

So with the innovative ideas and programs that you are delivering, with a federal government that is in full support of this new skills agenda, with provincial governments coming onboard, with employers understanding the urgency of these issues and increasing their investments, particularly in engaging Aboriginal Canadians in the workforce, I believe we can see a bright new horizon in a reform in our post-secondary education system that ultimately will be all about helping us to help young people to realize their potential and to contribute to our wonderful country’s prosperity.

Thanks very much for your time and for all the good work that you do.

-30-

Innovation vs. Austerity: how can Spain enhance its knowledge economy in austere times?

BusinessJune 3, 2014 admin

European Commission

[Check Against Delivery]

Máire GEOGHEGAN-QUINN

European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science

Innovation vs. Austerity: how can Spain enhance its knowledge economy in austere times?

The Economist’s Spain Summit Closing session

Madrid, 3 June 2014

Ladies and gentlemen,

The subject of this Summit, “Accelerating the return to growth”, could not be more relevant for the situation in Europe today.

After a long period of economic downturn, the signs of recovery in Europe are becoming evident. This is true in Spain, where the European Commission’s Spring forecast put growth in 2014 at 1.1 percent, rising to 2.1 percent in 2015.

However, the recovery remains fragile and uneven, and it is now urgent for the European Union to really focus on the measures that can secure growth and jobs.

I am convinced that research and innovation must be at the heart of a lasting recovery, so that Europe takes its place as the knowledge economy.

I’m certainly not alone in that conviction. Last October the EU Heads of State and Government declared clearly that ‘Investment in research and innovation fuels productivity and growth and is key for job creation’.

And the point of consensus following the European elections is that Europe must focus even more on jobs and growth.

Indeed, the evidence shows that the Member States that continued to invest in research and innovation have fared better in the current crisis.

There is also a wide agreement that investing in research and innovation is the entry ticket to the knowledge economy.

So it is worrying to see that many Member States have cut research and innovation spending in the last few years. In Spain, the public budget for research was cut by 25% in real terms between 2008 and 2012. And Spain is by no means the only such Member State.

At first glance, and considering the severe pressures on budgets, such cuts are perhaps understandable. However, public research investment helps create the knowledge base and talent that innovative companies need, and it also leverages business investment in research and innovation, crucial elements in fulfilling the aims of Europe 2020.

The countries that are cutting investments for a prolonged period risk losing the highly skilled talent that is essential to remain competitive and for generating future jobs and growth. It will be very difficult to recover from these lost investments.

So unless we reverse this trend, I am afraid that there will be parts of Europe that, in the long run, will not be able to compete in the knowledge economy. The ‘innovation divide’ risks becoming an entrenched economic divide.

It is against this backdrop that the European Commission is preparing new proposals that focus on research and innovation as the sources of renewed growth.

I will be presenting these with Vice President Olli Rehn next week.

One of the thorniest issues that we will address is how we solve the conundrum of investing more in research and innovation in times of fiscal consolidation, when public budgets are under greatest pressure.

The very clear message from the Commission is to prioritise and to reform.

Some countries have been here before. Finland turned its economy around in the 1990s by focusing on innovation and making the necessary investment, despite huge budget pressures.

At the same time, Finland reformed its research and innovation policies and has been continuously improving them ever since.

And more recently, we are seeing that continuing to invest in the sources of jobs and growth is paying off in several Member States and in the transformation of economies like South Korea and China.

And this is also what the EU did last year when it agreed its new seven-year budget.

While the overall budget envelope was reduced, there is a decisive shift towards research and innovation – with Horizon 2020 seeing a 30% real terms increase in finance. And hand in hand with this increase, Horizon 2020 has been radically reformed to be simpler and achieve greater impact.

Reform will bring in more business investment in innovation. Many businesses look globally when they invest in research and innovation. So Europe and Member States like Spain must be able to put forward an attractive proposition.

The Single Market is, I believe, a huge motivation to invest in Europe. But we need to make sure the Single Market works, especially in high tech areas such as the digital economy and biopharmaceuticals.

Progress at European level, for example on the European patent, remains essential, so we will continue to implement the innovation-friendly measures championed by the Innovation Union initiative.

Alongside these framework conditions, there is the potential for smart investments by the public sector to leverage private investment.

The European Union has just agreed six partnerships with industry worth some 17 billion euro in pharmaceuticals, ICT, transport and the bio economy. More than half of this investment comes from the private sector. This kind of public private partnership can, and should be, supported by individual countries.

Indeed, public and private investments in research and innovation are closely linked.

Our proposals next week will support governments to make the necessary reforms.

No government can fund world class science and innovation in all areas, and so each country must take tough decisions to prioritise their research and innovation budget in the areas where it will produce the greatest impacts.

The aim here must be smart specialisation – playing to a region or Member State’s particular strengths and talents and focusing resources where they have the greatest impact rather than spreading investment too widely and too thinly.

We’re encouraging this approach under the EU’s new Cohesion Policy. From now on, every Member State and region must have a smart specialisation strategy in place as a condition to receiving funding for research and innovation from the European Structural and Investment Funds.

I am also a firm believer that public funding for research and innovation should be allocated on a competitive basis to the best proposals. This objective approach is the foundation of excellent science, but it is not yet common practice in all Member States.

There is also much to be done to improve the performance of universities and public research organisations.

Universities need to be able to enter partnerships with business and other actors.

The performance of universities should be assessed independently. And positions in universities should be advertised openly with recruitment based on merit.

These reforms are all important ways to ensure that public money is being well spent. They will also enable the free movement of researchers and ideas across Europe creating a European Research Area.

We also need to reform how we finance research and innovation. Beyond grant funding, we have seen that many countries are using tax credits and financial instruments to support business research and innovation.

And at European level we have also reformed how we support research and innovation, with the new Horizon 2020 programme which has a budget of nearly 80 billion euro.

The programme aims to get bigger impacts for our investments in scientific excellence, industrial leadership and societal challenges.

Horizon 2020 also represents economic reform, designed to generate growth and jobs. We have a programme that has cut red-tape, where excellence is the benchmark and where we champion both top quality fundamental research, and its application in innovation.

The programme will promote even greater industry involvement, in particular for SMEs and new entrants.

Indeed, while research and innovation for SMEs are promoted across the whole programme, Horizon 2020 also introduces a new instrument designed to meet their specific needs.

There are also new financing options in the form of risk-sharing (through guarantees) or risk finance (through loans and equity) to support innovative companies.

I urge Spanish companies, including SMEs, to seek out the new opportunities provided by Horizon 2020. This is not just about support to finance innovative projects, but also to enable companies to access the best knowledge and expertise from across Europe.

But Horizon 2020 can only complement investment and reform at national level.

Spain is not facing its challenges alone – many Member States share similar problems. I know that Minister de Guindos, who is responsible for research in the Spanish government, is ambitious to reform, and the European Commission is keen to help.

For example, the Commission is financing a Peer Review of Spain’s research and innovation policy by experts from seven other European countries.

The European peer review will provide suggestions to Spain on how to reinforce the contribution of research and innovation to your economy and society.

Minister de Guindos has committed to closely examining the suggestions and take them on board.

Spain’s determination to reform has already resulted in the very welcome National Reform Programme, in particular the newly-adopted Strategy and Implementing Plan for Research and Innovation and the announcement of a National Research Agency.

These are the right steps, but what more could Spain do?

Yesterday, as part of the European Semester process the European Commission presented the results of its assessment for 2014, together with proposals for Country Specific Recommendations to be endorsed by the European Council.

Recommendations are made for each Member State, and the proposed recommendations for Spain include the financing of the new national strategy for science, technology and innovation as well as making operational the new State Research Agency.

This means that when Spain reviews its spending priorities within its fiscal consolidation strategy, it should identify the sources of funding for the new National Strategy and Plan for Science, Technology and Innovation.

The Commission also considers that Spain needs to increase the quality of research outputs. This means that the new State Research Agency should follow best practice in the allocation of funding to universities and other research-performing organisations based on their performance. Greater use should be made of competitive calls for proposals which use international standards of peer review. In the long run such measures will encourage excellence and deliver better value for money.

Finally, the Commission’s assessment is that Spain needs to foster public-private cooperation and facilitate the commercial development of research outputs. So there should be incentives for researchers, universities and public research organisations to cooperate with industry.

Ladies and gentlemen,

If I were to distill what I have been discussing down to one message, it would be this:

Combining investment and reform of research and innovation must be Europe’s roadmap to growth and prosperity.

I don’t underestimate the task. I know from my own experience with Horizon 2020 just how difficult this is, and I know what a big challenge it is for Spain.

This means a relentless focus on jobs and growth. It will mean Europe as a whole will need to shift resources towards research and innovation and other growth-enhancing measures.

This is already happening at the EU level, and the Commission is encouraging Member States to do likewise within their fiscal consolidation strategies.

At the same time we need to reform our research and innovation systems and create the framework conditions that will attract innovators, entrepreneurs and business investments.

It’s a challenge that I know you will meet and it is absolutely essential to do so – so that the economy that will emerge from the crisis will be very different from before.

We are with you every step of the way.

Thank you.

« Prev 1 … 571 572 573

Category: Business

President Barroso’s speech at the Euroscience Open Forum

Arms Control and International Security: Implementing Missile Defense in a Global Context

Harper Government Tables Text of Final Agreement of Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement

Quick Facts

Quotes

Related Products

Associated Links

Contacts

Keynote speech to the WIRE V Conference

Oceans Roundtable

Digital Canada 150 Launch

Commission points to innovation reforms to sustain economic recovery

The Honourable Jason Kenney delivered a speech at Polytechnics Canada’s 2014 annual conference

Innovation vs. Austerity: how can Spain enhance its knowledge economy in austere times?