The Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System released its report last week while I was playing boulevardier in Tokyo with Little Miss Sumo (somehow, I’d never really noticed what an enormous fraction of the city’s economy and real estate is devoted to cube toys and claw machines).  It’s more interesting than the usual Ottawa report, and not just because of the murky politics.

The report begins with a problematique wheremost of the space was devoted to telling the federal government in no uncertain terms that it needs to spend more money on fundamental research.  This was a particularly interesting choice because the committee’s mandate was clearly drafted in such a way as to exclude this topic from discussion.  They did so anyway, harping on the fact that current expenditures are basically unchanged from the mid-00s and arguing for an annual increase of research funding of ten percent for five years.  Paul Wells has written on this already, and I recommend his work as always.  I can’t imagine this endeared the committee to the feds, but I’ll keep my comments on politics to the end.

The committee then attempted to provide a more direct answer to the question it had been posed: namely, how do you make the granting councils more “responsive” and “agile”?  The committee did this by answering three separate but inter-related questions.  The first was: do we need separate councils for arts, sciences and medicine?  The second was: does it make sense to continue to saddle granting councils with a whole bunch of programs that are not related to their core mission?  And third: when government wants to set up some boutique research programs, or research that transcends disciplinary boundaries, should it be granting councils that fund these?   Their answers — yes, no, and no, respectively — are what shape the rest of the report.

Let’s take these in reverse order.  While tri-councils have a decent track record in supporting research that crosses disciplinary boundaries lying within their respective domains of knowledge, they haven’t had such a great record in supporting research that crosses those boundaries.  This matters because it is likely that an increasing proportion of research that the government wishes to fund is going to be exactly of this variety – research that focuses on “grand challenges”, such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Researchers have gotten pretty snippy about bespoke research topics being run through the granting councils (e.g. when the Harper government thew in $x million for research on Arctic security and asked SSHRC to manage it), but I don’t think it’s outlandish for central agencies or departments to want to allocate money for research based on current problems/challenges rather than on disciplinary boundaries set a century or more ago.  In any event, what the committee has said here is that this kind of money need to be distributed by someone other than the granting councils.

Then there is the issue of all the programs run by tri-councils which are not actually investigator grants.  These include talent programs, which include a raft of graduate scholarships, the Canada Research Chairs, the Indirect Costs of Research program, etc.  Most of these programs date from the Chrétien era and were handed to the councils to administer as a matter of convenience.  Basically, the committee said that all these should be taken out of the hands of granting councils, to be administered by someone else.

The granting councils themselves?  The committee said they were fine, but (and I’m paraphrasing a bit here) let granting councils be granting councils.  Let them be the bastions of disciplinary research, run competitions, and administer tens of thousands of tiny grants at a time, in ways that make sense to each research community.  But leave all that other stuff to someone else.

Now the question is: “who is that someone else”?  By saying “keep the granting councils”, the committee rejected the path taken by Australia, the UK and, for that matter, Quebec by merging everyone into One Big Council, while creating separate functional lines for these non-granting council activities listed above.  The report is mum on why they didn’t take that path, but it was a choice. Once that was ruled out, that logically that left the committee with a choice between three councils plus One Big Agency for Everything Else, or possibly three councils plus Two Big Agencies, one to handle interdisciplinary/grand challenge research, and one to handle all those ongoing routine programs the Chretien government foisted on the council 25 years ago. 

What they did was take the middle route: three councils plus One Big Agency for Everything Else, only they saddled the Agency with the moniker “The Canadian Knowledge and Science Foundation” (bad name, totally unworkable for an acronym – “See-ksif”? ; people will default to the initialism See-Kay-Ess-Eff and everyone will think it’s a campus radio station).  Financially, having ripped out all the talent programs out of the councils, this thing is going to be a behemoth.  If it also succeeds to rope in some other free-floating federal science money like the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF), it could end up being about twice as big as the councils combined.  But, you understand, this is not changing anything financially.  The granting councils would still be handling exactly as much money as they did before – it’s just that the value of all those other science programs will dwarf what goes out through core granting council programs, and the new system will make this very apparent.

Is this new Agency a good idea?  Beats the hell out of me. One Big Council, or three councils plus either one or two agencies, were all potential solutions here and none of them strike me as obviously worse than any others.  I don’t think the report makes a strong case for the chosen route over the others, but that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong choice.  Everything, I suspect, will come down to implementation.

But will this be implemented?  The report was submitted a few months ago and published very close to budget day, which you would think means the government will at least reference the report in tomorrow’s budget.  Contrast this to 2017 when the government kept the already-written Naylor report under wraps until after the budget was published, allowing it to punt the issue for another 12 months.  My view is that there is little chance of the report being accepted whole and announced tomorrow; what we will probably get is some kind of “we-believe-research-is-SO-important-and-we’ll-consult-widely” statement.

In the longer term, though, I think this architecture has one thing potentially going for it, namely that it is new.  Clearly, our current government is not more enamored with the old system.  But maybe, just maybe, if there’s a “new” organization (even if it is just a grafting together of stuff that used to be grafted to granting councils), that new organization might just be new and shiny enough to…fund?

We can hope anyway.  Stay tuned for more on this in our budget coverage tomorrow.