Hi all. This is a bit embarrassing, but I need to come clean about something. I made a graph about federal government research expenditures back on budget night and have reused it several times since to make a point about anemic federal spending. The problem is, I goofed.

Here is the graph, supposedly depicting federal spending on the tri-councils and the Canada Foundation for Innovation in millions real (that is, inflation-adjusted) $2023 dollars, including the increases in funding out to 2028-29 which were announced in the April budget. What it seemed to show was that even after those increases, were still below where we were under Stephen Harper.

Figure 1: Incorrect Graph on Federal Research Expenditures 

The problem is that on the rush of budget night, as I was adjusting all that past data for inflation, I failed to notice that the data I was adjusting had *already* been adjusted for inflation. That doesn’t make much of a difference when portraying data for the last couple of years, but when you start going back a decade or more, it really inflates the old numbers relative to the present. Here’s what the figure should have looked like, in millions of real $2023.

Figure 2: Correct Graph on Federal Research Expenditures

I wouldn’t say the second graph is a rousing endorsement of federal policy on the research file but tells a story which is a darn sight better than the first graph.

Anyways, I have some corrections to make both to our budget document and the introduction of The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada (where the figure was used in the introduction), which will happen later this week. But now y’all know the error. Apologies and I’ll try not to make this mistake again.

Alex