Canada hesitates to join global research race

Canada’s academic research community is growing anxious about its future after a federal expert panel warned of the nation’s dangerously tepid funding and poor coordination in science, and prime minister Justin Trudeau’s administration responded with even more financial restraint.

Trudeau government ministers asked for the review last autumn, and the panel of academics led by Frédéric Bouchard, the dean of arts and sciences at the University of Montreal, responded by chronicling two decades of harmful declines in Canada’s investment in scientific research.

Dr Bouchard’s seven-member Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System also urged the creation of a new governmental science agency to handle project-centred interdisciplinary research and to coordinate international collaborations, so that the three existing funding councils could focus on investigator-driven science.

Yet, as the Bouchard team finished its work, the government seemingly ignored it, almost simultaneously issuing a 2023 budget that offered no increases in research spending or in support for graduate and postdoctorate scholarships that the advisory panel also highlighted as urgent.

Those developments prompted lamentations across Canadian higher education. The nation’s main postsecondary advocacy group, Universities Canada, wrote to the prime minister to describe its “deep disappointment” with the budget, saying it would leave Canadians further behind in a global competition for economic success that is increasingly based on research accomplishment.

“We’re losing ground,” Dr Bouchard said in an interview. “The global race in science is quickening, and Canada is not running fast enough.”

The Trudeau administration, in a statement from the federal Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, said it has made robust investments in science and said it asked for Dr Bouchard's study because it understands that Canada's research needs "are increasingly complex, collaborative, multi- and inter-disciplinary, and international. 

"We are seized with the important task of building a stronger foundation to support researchers in Canada and ensuring the long-term competitiveness of Canadian science and research, which is why we are carefully considering the panel’s recommendations," the department told Times Higher Education. 

Among its key data points, the Bouchard panel showed that Canada’s share of GDP invested in research and development dropped from 1.9 per cent to 1.6 per cent over the past 20 years, while most developed countries improved on that measure. Federal funding for graduate scholarships and fellowships hasn’t increased over those two decades, as Canada went from a leading position of having 7.5 researchers per 1,000 people to a higher yet more average figure among developed nations of 9.4, the panel said.

Canada’s scientific enterprise looks especially vulnerable to talent loss, Dr Bouchard said, after the US last year enacted two measures – the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act – that each allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to scientific endeavours.

Many other developed nations – including South Korea, Germany, Japan and Norway – have also been prioritising science, Dr Bouchard said. “Basically, we’re telling the Canadian government to do the same and to do it quickly,” he added.

The resulting “brain drain” was costing the Canadian economy at least C$1 billion (£600 million) a year, said Marc Johnson, a professor of biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga and an organiser with Support Our Science, a group that advocates for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in Canada. “The Trudeau-[deputy prime minister Chrystia] Freeland government has made it clear that they have no vision for Canadian science and innovation, and they are fine for Canada to be at the back of the pack” globally, Professor Johnson said.

The Bouchard panel recommended a 10 per cent annual increase over five years for the three existing granting councils, separate funding for the proposed Canadian Knowledge and Science Foundation, which would provide a single point of contact for foreign collaborators who struggle to find partners through that mix of federal councils, and increased funding support for graduate researchers.

One of the nation’s more prominent scientific voices is Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo, who won a share of the 2018 physics Nobel for work she did in the US, and has decided to attack the investment problem with a venture that will try to raise public trust in science. “Somehow, I don’t think in Canada we have near the emphasis” on understanding the economic value of science, she said in an interview.

Dr Bouchard’s diagnosis also centres on Canadian attitudes. “As a country, we’re not as comfortable talking about ambition and about winning,” he said. “We call it the tall poppy syndrome – the tall poppy is the one that gets cut.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com