The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, had their budgets cut in this year's budget. Over the next three years, the premier science funding institutes in Canada will be receiving less money, while countries around the world inject stimulus funds into technology, innovation, and research.
While other countries in the world continue to see the benefit to funding science, we will continue to lose out on knowledge based economics. How do you think that will help Canada's lagging productivity? If NSERC has less money for the Irap program , that surely doesn't help. If Canadian scientists go to other countries where they do see the value in science funding, that doesn't help.
Looks like your data doesn't seem to be quite the same as my data.
Quote:
On Tuesday, January 27th, the Harper government brought down its long-awaited budget. The Liberals indicated their support, so the coalition is dead and the Harper government alive.
One of the most worrying features of this government has been its antipathy to intellectuals and artists. As for the latter, Harper traduced artists in the last election campaign as citified types who go to a lot of cocktail parties -- and lost a lot of seats in arts-loving Quebec as a result. As far as this is concerned, the Government may have learned its lesson: 160 million is in the works for big arts festivals (and the attendant cocktail parties in big cities, one imagines). Well, good -- but it's a pity that struggling avant-garde artists won't benefit from this.
With respect to universities, the Harper record hasn't been bad. At least up until now. Paul Martin, the former Prime Minister, was a staunch believer in universities (though not necessarily a supporter of pure research in humanities) and under him, the three federal research granting councils had strong budget increases, peaking (under Harper) at around 2 billion dollars per year. This, together with such programs as the Canada Research Chairs and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, has brought considerable excitement to Canadian universities in recent years. There's a palpable feeling of things happening.
In this week's budget, however, the news for research was quite bad. Today (January 29, 2009) the Globe and Mail reported on its front page that Genome Canada's funding from the feds had dropped to zero. This is a high-profile and high-prestige agency, and is very visible in cities like Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, which have large medical research establishments. In the 2008 budget, Genome Canada received an increase of 140 million. Today, it's gone from the budget altogether. This seems bizarre. A 100% cut! (UPDATE: Colin Farrely points out that this story is based on a misinterpretation of how the Government funds Genome Canada. It does so by means of one-time grants, not by on-going base funding. In the last two years, Genome Canada got grants of $100m and 140m. These grants can be drawn on any time over the subsequent four years, and are still current. However, no new money came in this year.
Unquote.
Apart from this columists failure to understand block funding for the Genome
Project I agree with his assessment.
The Harper Government increased funding for science research to the highest level it has ever been.
Flaherty froze funding increases on his last budget update.
So the bottom line is still that the Granting Councils are getting the most funding ever recorded under the Harper Government.
To repeat myself the University my wife is on staff with has received very large bloc funding grants for various research projects.
The University now has received far more in research grants under the Harper Government than it ever did under a Liberal government.
So I guess I go by the the figures I see.
And you must see or hear different figures.
Trex
