Arthur Carty

    When Paul Martin succeeded fellow Liberal Jean Chrétien on December 12^th as Canadian Prime Minister he said he would make science and technology a central pillar of government policy. "I'm making it a fundamental tenet of my government." As an sign of his commitment, he designated Arthur Carty, then president of the National Research Council, Canada, the country's main research and development agency, to become full-time science adviser to the prime minister – the first such appointment in Canada for 30 years.

On June 24 Science published a letter signed by forty Canadian researchers titled "Problems with co-funding in Canada". The letter highlights certain concerns which the writers believe can and do lead to some undesirable distortions in the fabric of support for research in Canada. The letter's two most salient paragraphs state:

...co-funding is often biased against fundamental research that is far from commercialization and so at odds with the short-term goals of industrial partners. The vicissitudes of most co-funding sources also severely compromise the sustainability of long-term research platforms. ...Moreover, the mega-scale mandate of many co-funding initiatives virtually eliminates the individual researcher or small teams in favor of larger, sometimes artificial, consortiums. Perhaps most troubling from a scientific perspective, the criteria for eligible co-funding are inherently subjective.

 

By eschewing scientific excellence as the primary consideration, co-funded programs imperil scientific credibility and fail to engage the breadth and depth of national scientific expertise. We encourage governments, scientific administrators, and scientists in Canada and other countries not to succumb to the superficial allure of co-funding but rather to evaluate and fully fund research on its own merits. The manifold benefits to society will inevitably follow, as was long the case before the advent of co-funding programs.

On July 19 The Executive Director of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies wrote to TFW giving his views regarding co-funding as practiced in Australia.

Now in a letter published in the August 5 issue of Science Dr Carty has responded to the criticism and in essence suggests that the forty Canadian researchers don't know what they're talking about.

The Letter leaves the distinct impression that Canadian scientific excellence is being compromised by an overemphasis on short-term industrial and commercial interests.

 

Federal allocations to university R&D have increased by $13 billion Canadian since 1997-98, giving Canada the highest expenditures on higher education R&D per capita among G8 countries. For 2003-04 and 2004-05, only 22% of total expenditures from all federal granting bodies required co-funding.

 

Co-funding programs... are an important element in a range of funding vehicles designed to foster a world-class research enterprise in Canada. The largest programs with co-funding requirements are the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and Genome Canada (GC).

 

For both the CFI and GC programs, provincial governments and not industry have provided most of the co-funding, a fact not mentioned by the Letter writers.

 

Another major point made in the Letter is that "[by] eschewing scientific excellence as the primary consideration, co-funded programs imperil scientific credibility…," [S]cientific excellence is not compromised. However, scientific merit is not necessarily the sole determinant of success. For projects involving multimillion dollar investments of public money, funders have a responsibility to ensure that grantees are accountable for the use of funds through sound financial and management practices... [and, therefore,] a portion of publicly funded research is subject to a double test of peer-reviewed excellence and the ability to attract co-funding partners from the public and private sectors.

Whether or not Dr Carty has answered the researchers' criticisms we leave to the reader.