Canadian researchers are disproportionately productive and do an outstanding amount of science in light of the amount of funding they receive. That may change. It now seems that the Conservative government of Stephen Harper has taken even more steps to gut Canadian basic science.
Budget erases funding for key science agency
Carolyn Abraham
Globe and Mail January 29, 2009The only agency that regularly finances large-scale science in Canada was shut out of Tuesday’s federal budget, putting at risk thousands of jobs and some of the most promising medical research, and forcing the country to pull out of key international projects.
“We got nothing, nothing, and we don’t know why,” said a stunned Martin Godbout, Genome Canada president and CEO. “We’re devastated.”
For the first time in nine years, Genome Canada, a non-profit non-governmental funding organization, was not mentioned in the federal budget and saw its annual cash injection from Ottawa – $140-million last year – disappear.
…
While research leaders have applauded the Conservatives’ plan to spend billions on construction and fixing old buildings on university campuses, they are mystified that the money to operate these facilities seems to be shrinking – particularly when U.S. President Barack Obama plans to double research funds in the U.S. over the next decade.
When President Obama comes to Canada, we can show him some nice labs with no one in them," said Dr. Godbout, who compared the situation to supplying planes but no pilots or ground crews.
…
Dr. Godbout said he spent the day fielding calls from worried scientists and making calls to research funding partners in the United States and Europe saying that Canada would have to withdraw from a few key international projects – including some that were to be Canadian-led. Among them, he said, is the worldwide effort to sequence the genomes of 50 different types of cancer.
It’s not just big science. The Conservatives also plan to chop $87.2 million from the federal granting agencies in the next three years. They say this will not affect the amount provided to individual researchers, but their trend of focusing on (their own) priority areas could very well mean that basic research will be gutted in the same manner as big science.
This is bad news. This is very, very bad news.
I know, it’s just gobsmackingly awful, isn’t it? And Genome Canada say they had no warning… I wonder if it’s possible, as some people have suggested, that the government just plain forgot to include them in the budget? Not that incompetence is any more reassuring than malicious intent.
I had lunch with our institutional Government Infrastructure grants person (who also worked in the provincial government for many years). His comment: “they don’t make mistakes”. And I believe him. What would you do if you were framing a new federal budget? If it were me, the first thing I’d do would be to look at last year’s budget and see what’s in it.
That said, we already know that members at various levels of government and in a variety of Ministries have been misinformed in the past about Genome Canada’s role and operations. I suspect that almost all Canadians believe it’s like NSERC or CIHR, getting base funding every year, and that this budget simply doesn’t give anything extra. Which is, of course, incorrect – zero dollars for GC in this budget means they get zero dollars in total.
The Genome Canada/Italy joint initiative (currently at the LOI stage), and competitions that were anticipated around the position papers in Child Health Genomics and Animal Genomics are now essentially dead, unless something changes. Existing initiatives (the ‘ABC’ competition in plants and bioproducts, the remaining years of Competition III projects, and the upcoming Platform competition) are probably ok… for now.
The ask was for $350M over five years, an average of $70M per year, which is not even out of line with previous asks from GC.
Thanks to Carolyn for this article – it can only help. Front and centre on the national newspaper this morning. No way Prime Minister Harper could have missed this one.
“they don’t make mistakes”
Hopefully they just made a very very BIG one that will contribute to them being booted out sooner rather than later.
I’m off to find out whether non-citizens are allowed to lobby their local MPs. Mind you our guy is NDP so it won’t do any good.
Update – Marc Garneau is intending to ask some questions in parliament today. Let’s hope somebody listens.
Story here
Did you read the comments on that article?!
Teh stupid, it burns!
I didn’t read more than a few – they were making me angry.
Well, anyone who comments on teh intachoobs isn’t exactly—
I’ll stop there.
…oh dear…
not to reassuring no.