Category: Funding and Finances

The Rock

No, not Dwayne Johnson (though You’re Welcome is indeed a great song).   I’m talking about Newfoundland (and Labrador), where the Minister of Advanced Education, Gerry Byrne, has decided to pick a fight with Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN). Why, you ask?  Good question. MUN is in a position somewhat like the one the University of Alberta faced a couple of years ago, only worse.  Up to about 2012, a decade of hydrocarbon-fueled provincial budgets made MUN a pretty fun place.  The provincial

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Naylor Report, Take 1

People are asking why I haven’t talked about the Naylor Report (aka the Review of Fundamental Science) yet.  The answer, briefly, is i) I’m swamped ii) there’s a lot to talk about in there and iii) I want to have some time to think it over.  But I did have some thoughts about chapter 3, where I think there is either an inadvertent error or the authors are trying to pull a fast one (and if it’s the latter I

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The Meaning of Zero

I’ve had a lot of time over the past week to think about the federal budget. And the more I think about it, the more baffled I am about the decision to completely stuff the granting councils. I think it is either a sign of real political ineptness, or that something pretty awful is in the pipeline. It’s not as though the Liberals are averse to spending on Science, per se. The budget dropped hundreds of millions of dollars on

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What’s Next for Student Aid

A few months ago, someone asked me what I wanted to see in the budget.  I said i) investment in aboriginal PSE, ii) system changes for the benefit of mature students and iii) changes to loan repayment (specifically, a reduction of the maximum loan payment from 20%  of disposable income to 15%).  To my great pleasure, the government came through on two of those wishes.  But there is still a lot of work to do yet. Let’s start with the Post-Secondary

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Conflicting Views on Research Funding

Every year on budget night, we at HESA Towers publish a graph tracking granting council expenditures in real dollars.  This year it looks like this: Tri-council Funding Envelopes Some people really like the graph and pass it around and re-tweet it because it shows that whatever governments say about their love for science and innovation, it’s not showing up in budgets.  Others (hi Nassif!) dislike it because it doesn’t do justice to how badly researchers are faring under the current

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