Review of Canadian content in a digital world: submission

Mobilizing people and ideas: supporting the creative economy and fostering Canadian culture in the digital world

The Government of Canada’s review of federal cultural policy offers an opportunity for Canada to be ambitious: to enhance our competitive position for global creative and cultural excellence; to build on existing strengths to boost Canada’s innovation, ingenuity and cultural leadership; and to enable Canada’s creators and cultural entrepreneurs to reach international audiences. Canada can be a leader in the global creative economy and harnessing universities’ strengths and expertise can help get us there.

To achieve these goals, Universities Canada makes the following recommendations.

Mobilizing discovery and ideas: universities as cultural hubs

• Make significant and transformative investments in discovery research through the federal granting councils and ensure sustained investment in the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
• Provide additional support for multidisciplinary research to enable Canadian researchers to work in partnership across disciplines, including design research.
• Create a new, nimble international research collaboration tri-agency fund to bolster Canada’s position as a partner of choice for collaboration.
• Take steps to address the digital research infrastructure needs of the research community across Canada.

Mobilizing people: the next generation of creators and cultural entrepreneurs

• Invest in new federal measures to incentivize all employers—including those in the creative economy—to create more paid co-op and internship placements across disciplines.
• Continue to support business incubators and accelerators—many of which involve Canada’s universities—given the key role they play in fostering entrepreneurship and assisting the growth of Canadian businesses, including in the cultural sectors.
• Celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial by investing in our next generation of leaders and increasing the outbound mobility of university students to 50,000 students abroad per year by 2022.
• Increase investment in the branding and marketing of Canadian higher education abroad to position Canada as the top destination of choice for cultural talent.
• Enhance support for Indigenous university students through more student financial assistance; scale up institutional initiatives that promote Indigenous student retention and success; and increase support through the federal granting councils to enable more Indigenous students to pursue graduate and post-graduate studies.

Supporting a vibrant cultural ecosystem

• Universities Canada strongly recommends that the government continue to maintain an appropriate balance between owners’ and users’ rights during the upcoming parliamentary review of the Copyright Act by preserving: 1) the existing fair dealing provisions for education, research and private study, and 2) the existing provisions for educational institutions.