"Innovation happens right here in every region, in every part of the country, and it creates wealth. It creates social impact," said Sirois during his keynote address at CIM 2023.  

While Canada has been a leader in innovation, from CANDU reactors to the Canada Arm, the nation is less competitive than some of its international counterparts.

"Even in [Canada's] great metropolitan centres, productivity -the wealth created- Is lower than in most other North American metropolitan areas," he said. "We must create wealth equal to our potential equal to our knowledge, equal to our research, equal to what we are capable of because the wealth we create will come from our creativity."

Sirois then presented a survey of Canadian business leaders about their levels of innovation and R&D expenditures.

"The difference between those enterprises that have innovation projects and do not have innovation projects is 2.5 times more expected growth.," he said. "It makes a difference. It pays the end of it. And this is a concrete demonstration."

Although investment in innovation has benefits, R&D spending has been declining nationwide, a "worrisome" trend for the head of Quebec's innovation council.

Broken down provincially and across all sectors, only 6% of enterprises in Quebec worked on research projects, 8% in British Columbia and 17% in Ontario.

In the mining sector, Sirois also sees a reduction.

"In the mining sector, we've seen those trends of productivity slowing and going down," he said.

He explained that productivity growth in the industry is "always triggered by reductions of manpower".

"As we reduce manpower, we succeed in creating productivity growth. But as we hire again, productivity goes down, and that's a sad conclusion," he said. "The key for us is to drive innovation so that the productivity growth will always grow and always prevail."

Despite lagging the world in productivity growth, Canada is a leader in patent registration, even outpacing the US. To spur innovation, Sirois suggests companies look to government subsidies and programs to help derisk the R&D process.

While the country may lag in productivity, decarbonisation expenditures have been growing nationwide, with 78% of the mining business leaders surveyed saying it was something they were doing.

78% is fantastic. It shows how committed the industry is," he said. "But 22% of enterprises here in Canada still did not do a single project."

Digging deeper into the data, Sirois saw that organisations focused on "reducing resource consumption through recycling, reducing resource consumption through alternative types of products, reducing the materials used per unit of production and on energy as well."

Following the money, Sirois found that mining sector is especially interested in a particular type of carbon-free energy.

"Interestingly, the money is [heavily] invested in nuclear energy as an alternative energy source," he said.