Ottawa Sun
Published: Saturday, June 18, 2005

Nowhere to go

Hello from Philadelphia, home of the Liberty Bell, the best cheese-steak sandwiches on the planet and host city for the BIO 2005 convention.

BIO is the largest and premier annual gathering of the biotechnology and biopharmaceutical industry on the face of the planet. Over the next four days some 18,000 delegates (company executives, research scientists, government officials, venture capitalists, intellectual property lawyers, equipment vendors and the media) will gather at the Pennsylvania Convention Centre to discuss how innovative pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and fields such as nanotechnology and genetic engineering are fusing together and driving advances in medical science and agricultural production.

This intersection of industry is poised and already delivering on the promise of eradicating disease and feeding the world. Without a doubt it is the most dynamic and value added industrial sector -- beating out high tech and telecommunications -- which explains why politicians and bureaucrats from almost every industrialized country are here trying to land a piece of this 21st century, society altering pie.

So why should you care about BIO in Philly?

To start, the Canadian delegation is almost 1,000-strong, with Canuck participants equally split across the public and private sectors.

Moreover, four premiers (McGuinty, Charest, Campbell and Doer) will all make appearances -- along with other provincial and federal officials -- and participate in various events to try and entice companies and scientists to come to Canada. In each pitch, our politicians will boast about our basic research infrastructure, leading universities and hospitals, and various tax incentives in trying to seal the deal.

However, as I've argued in this space before, until Canada decides -- in the words of Dr. Henry Friesen (the visionary behind the Canadian Institutes of Health Research) -- to stop viewing health care as a cost to be borne and centrally planned and changes the paradigm to see it as an opportunity to be exploited and the economic engine which will drive our economy for the next 50 years, these pitches will fall on deaf ears and provincial and federal success at BIO 2005 will be muted at best.

To be fair, governments have invested considerable sums of money (in the billions) into basic research over the past decade which is a legitimate and wholly defensible use of tax dollars. Yet we have failed to harness this basic research into a critical mass of applications (services, products and tools) that can be translated from the lab desk to the hospital bedside or to the farmer's field.

The most promising applications have been sucked up by savvy American, European and Japanese investors as our private sector has not adequately financed and commercialized the fruits of this research. I believe the reason for this is that we have a collective institutional mindset (public and private) that is stuck in the 20th century and still in love with our traditional manufacturing and resource sectors.

While these sectors are important and will remain key to our economic stability, without a concerted focus into the life sciences field, the erosion of Canada's economic power on the global stage will continue which means a lower standard of living for us and our kids in the long run.

Investment capital goes where risk is low and reward is high and sadly our intellectual property protection regime is not the most competitive. In addition, governments continue to give greater focus to health care cost-containment instead of turning to the promotion of innovation and quality to improve population health outcomes and ultimately lower costs.

Turning to the bottom line, BIO 2005 will generate some 30,000 hotel room nights and while I remain skeptical of the economic multiplier impact analyses for conventions, even I will admit the infusion into the greater-Philly economy will be in the tens of millions of dollars, not to mention a legacy impact in the coming years.

Only Vancouver now has the capacity to host a convention of this size. Toronto hosted BIO in 2002 but its Convention Centre was bursting at the seams with 15,000 delegates. And as I stroll through the corridors and huge exhibit halls here in Philly, I'm reminded of the foot dragging and lack of leadership we continue to see on the Ottawa Congress Centre file. So yes, we need to get our act together in more ways than one.