SENATORS’ STATEMENTS — Innovation in Health Care

Honourable senators, every day, I get to meet Canadian innovators who are unlocking remarkable solutions to our most pressing public sector challenges. Nowhere is this more urgent than in health care. Canadians struggle to access care, and that’s the cruel irony. Once they do, it’s some of the best care in the world. The barrier isn’t quality. It’s the “system” surrounding it.

This was at the heart of my remarks yesterday at the twenty‑fifth annual Research Money Conference. After more than three decades of meeting brilliant Canadian innovators, I’ve watched too many of them build world-class solutions, only to be blocked from deploying those solutions at home. At roughly $11,000 in public funding per citizen spent annually on health care, Canada is one of the top spenders among universal-access countries. Yet stretched budgets and aging demographics mean that spending our way to better outcomes isn’t an option. We need to innovate our way there.

Canada produces world-class health research, data and talent. This week’s federal commitment to fund VITAL, an AI-powered health data program at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital, shows real promise in turning anonymized data into cost savings and better patient outcomes. That’s encouraging, but it’s not enough. Canada’s persistent failure isn’t in generating ideas; it’s in deploying them. We pour billions into health sciences research without a serious commercialization strategy. We invest billions in discovering intellectual property, or IP, without a plan or system needed to put it to work. We celebrate breakthroughs in Canadian labs that never reach Canadian bedsides.

Yesterday, another of the speakers was Dr. Dante Morra, CEO of the CAN Health Network. The highly successful CAN Health model cuts through federal, provincial and territorial red tape, connecting innovators directly with health care operators. They’re demonstrating what’s possible when we stop letting bureaucracy stand between a proven solution and the health care providers and patients who need it.

The path forward is clear: modernize procurement to deploy innovative Canadian solutions to Canadian problems for the benefit of Canadian patients. Expand legislation to interconnect data beyond medical equipment and devices, and build a robust commercialization strategy — not just a research one.

Our health care access crisis demands that we follow a new path. We have the critical ingredients. We have a government that repeatedly states their willingness to act boldly. Let’s establish a major project in health care that will take bold steps before another generation of Canadian innovation gets lost in the system it was built to fix.

Thank you.