Morning all.  Sorry about the service interruption.  Nice to be back.

So, I promised you some more thoughts about the Fundamental Science Review.  Now that I’ve lot of time to think about it, I think I’m actually surprised by what it doesn’t say, says and how many questions remain open.

What’s best about the report?  The history and most of the analysis are pretty good.  I think a few specific recommendations (if adopted) might actually be a pretty big deal – in particular the one saying that the granting councils should stop any programs forcing researchers to come up with matching funding, mainly because it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

What’s so-so about it?  The money stuff for a start.  As I noted in my last blog post, I don’t really think you can justify a claim to more money based on “proportion of higher ed investment research coming from federal government”.  I’m more sympathetic to the argument that there needs to be more funds, especially for early career researchers, but as noted back here it’s hard to argue simultaneously that institutions should have unfettered rights to hire researchers but that the federal government should be pick up responsibility for their career progression.

The report doesn’t even bother, really, to make the case that more money on basic research means more innovation and economic growth.  Rather, it simply states it, as if it were a fact (it’s not).  This is the research community trying to annex the term “innovation” rather than co-exist with it.  Maybe that works in today’s political environment; I’m not sure it improves overall policy-making.  In some ways, I think it would have been preferable to just say: we need so many millions because that’s what it takes to do the kind of first-class science we’re capable of.  It might not have been politic, but it would have had the advantage of clarity.

…and the Governance stuff?  The report backs two big changes in governance.  One is a Four Agency Co-ordinating Board for the three councils plus the Canada Foundation for Innovation (which we might as well now call the fourth council, provided it gets an annual budget as recommended here), to ensure greater cross-council coherence in policy and programs.  The second is the creation of a National Advisory Committee on Research and Innovation (NACRI) to replace the current Science, Technology and Innovation Council and do a great deal else besides.

The Co-ordinating committee idea makes sense: there are some areas where there would be clear benefits to greater policy coherence.  But setting up a forum to reconcile interests is not the same thing as actually bridging differences.  There are reasons – not very good ones, perhaps, but reasons nonetheless – why councils don’t spontaneously co-ordinate their actions; setting up a committee is a step towards getting them to do so, but success in this endeavour requires sustained good will which will not necessarily be forthcoming.

NACRI is a different story.  Two points here.  The first is that it is pretty clear that NACRI is designed to try to insulate the councils and the investigator-driven research they fund from politicians’ bright ideas about how to run scientific research.  Inshallah, but if politicians want to meddle – and the last two decades seem to show they want to do it a lot – then they’re going to meddle, NACRI or no.  Second, the NACRI as designed here is somewhat heavier on the “R” than on the “I”.  My impression is that as with some of the funding arguments, this is an attempt to hijack the Innovation agenda in Research’s favour.  I think a lot of people are OK with this because they’d prefer the emphasis to be on science and research rather than innovation but I’m not sure we’re doing long-term policy-making in the area any favours by not being explicit about this rationale.

What’s missing?  The report somewhat surprisingly punted what I expected to be a major issue: namely, the government’s increasing tendency over time to fund science outside the framework of the councils in such programs as the Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC) and the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF).  While the text of the report makes clear the authors’ have some reservations about these programs, the recommendations are limited to a “you should review that, sometime soon”.  This is too bad, because phasing out these kinds of programs would be an obvious way to pay for increase investigator-driven funding (though as Nassif Ghoussoub points out here  it’s not necessarily a quick solution because funds are already committed for several years in advance).  The report therefore seems to suggest that though it deplores past trends away from investigator-driven funding, it doesn’t want to see these recent initiatives defunded, which might be seen in government as “having your cake and eating it too”.

What will the long-term impact of the report be? Hard to say: much depends on how much of this the government actually takes up, and it will be some months before we know that.  But I think the way the report was commissioned may have some unintended adverse consequences.  Specifically, I think the fact that this review was set up in such a way as to exclude consideration of applied research – while perfectly understandable – is going to contribute to the latter being something of a political orphan for the foreseeable future.  Similarly, the fact that the report was done in isolation from the broader development of Innovation policy might seem like a blessing given the general ham-fistedness surrounding the Innovation file, in the end I wonder if the end result won’t be an effective division of policy, with research being something the feds pay universities do and innovation something they pay firms to do.  That’s basically the right division, of course, but what goes missing are vital questions about how to make the two mutually reinforcing.

Bottom line: it’s a good report.  But even if the government fully embraces the recommendations, there are still years of messy but important work ahead.