Canadian Science Budget a Bit Thin This Year. (March 6, 2010)

Wayne Kundro of ScienceInsider reports that Canada's Finance Minister Jim Flaherty partially offset scheduled cuts in the budgets of the nation's three granting councils. However, they're still cut and there'll be tighter competition for research operating grants.

CAN$43.65 million over 5 years has been earmarked to create 140 "prestigious post-doctoral fellowships … to attract top-level talent to Canada." They'll be worth CAN$67,917.50 per year for 2 years.

But no funds have been allocated to any of the special initiatives that the community had requested, and overall it was a flat-lined science budget. Nevertheless "the community was grateful that the government decided to delay by a year its efforts to rein in the federal deficit".

According to Mr Kundro:

Allocations for the nation's three research granting councils, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council will rise by an aggregate $31.04 million in each of the next 2 years. But that doesn't offset the $41.71 million and $84.59 million hits that the councils are collectively scheduled to take in the next 2 fiscal years as a result of restraint measures announced in 2009. The council's respective budgets for 2010-11 will be roughly $957 million, $992 million, and $660 million, but about 30% of the medical and natural sciences budgets, and about 45% of the social sciences budget, represent monies that are administered by the councils on behalf of the government for designated programs like one to provide assistance to universities to cover the indirect costs of research. The latter monies are not available for operating grants or other granting council research initiatives.

And the announcement that the government will conduct the latest in a series of reviews of federal science spending has met with a collective groan. "It will look to industry for guidance on how to spend its research money, aiming for outlays to be aligned along commercialization priorities, documents stated, so they will inform future decisions regarding federal support for R&D."

Canadian Association of University Teachers Executive Director Jim Turk's comment was that the review is intended: "to tie academic research into the private sector."