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Stephen Harper’s Tories landed in London Tuesday promising to make the city a beachhead to turn around Ontario’s battered economy, pledging $75 million to turn big ideas into big bucks.

With Western’s Robarts Research Institute as a backdrop, Minister of State Gary Goodyear said his government would speed to market the best high-tech tools produced by colleges, universities, business and industry.

“We’re looking for large scale . . . game-changers,” he said.

More big funding announcements will be revealed in coming weeks, he said — sounding like someone acutely aware of the possibility of a federal election.

“Ontario is a have-not province and that’s something the prime minister is concerned about,” Goodyear said.

His announcement left scientists nearly jumping for joy after years of seeing potential breakthroughs gather dust because there wasn’t cash for clinical trials needed to get industry to heavily invest.

“The funding is huge,” said Ting Lee, a scientist at Robarts and the University of Western Ontario.

“This type of program is what we’ve been waiting for so long,” Lee said.

The feds’ economic development agency for Southern Ontario will dole out the money over four years to applicants who bring a partner outside of government to the table. The agency will fund up to 50% of the costs of approved projects.

That’s an area in which Robarts has already been a leader, said Ted Hewitt, UWO’s vice-president in charge of research.

During the last two years, Robarts and London’s Lawson Health Research Institute have spun off business that’s created $85 million in income, the third most in Canada, he said.

“This generous investment will help us to provide industry partners with a competitive advantage, create jobs, improve technologies and help ensure future prosperity,” Hewitt said.

Getting that edge is critical, said Lee, who created software that detects blood flow using CT scans, first as a tool used by doctors to determine when they can use a clot-busting drug on victims of stroke.

Without the software, doctors relied on an accepted practice that ruled out most stroke victims for fear of causing uncontrolled bleeding or making it worse. The drug was only used within three hours of the onset of stroke symptoms.

Lee’s software showed more precisely who was at risk so clot-busters could be given to many more patients, a ten-fold increase, its safe use reducing the risk of death or debilitating brain damage.

It took Lee 10 years to develop the software and another five to persuade a company to back it. He thinks the program announced this week might have shaved three or four years off that wait.

That would not only have improved patients’ outcomes, but saved the economy big bucks as stroke causes injuries that cost the economy $2.7 billion.

Lee still hopes to benefit from the new federal program. He’s already using the imaging software to monitor the effectiveness of new chemotherapy on victims of ovarian cancer and hopes to test its utility on victims of heart attack.

He believes the program will help scientists in Ontario leapfrog their American counterparts whom, until now, we’re better funded.