The Mowat Institute showed some canny timing by releasing its paper, Canada’s Innovation Underperformance: Whose Policy Problem Is It?, on the Friday before the federal government’s Research and Development Review Panel reports. It was a real master-class in media management.

The report, authored by Tijs Creutzberg, doesn’t break a lot of new ground; in many ways it’s just a lit review, albeit a very nicely-written one. Basically, it argues two things: i) that our government innovation strategies are overly biased towards tax-credits and make insufficient use of direct cash support and ii) that there is too much overlap between federal and provincial policy instruments.

Though the first issue got the lion’s share of the media attention Friday, it’s actually the place where the report is thinnest. The report’s “evidence” basically consists of one graph which shows Canada as a policy outlier in its reliance on tax credits (not news if you’ve been keeping up with the OECD literature), and two paper citations on the benefits of direct subsidies over tax credits (one of which, if you bother to look it up, actually says nothing at all about the relative efficacy of direct support versus tax credits). Creutzberg may well be right about this, but on the evidence presented, it’s hard to tell.

On the second issue – that of carving more rational policy roles for the federal and provincial government – Creutzberg oozes good sense about the importance of place and regions in research, and then comes up with an eminently logical way of dividing up policy responsibilities between the two. The problem is that some of the recommendations come off sounding a tad too idealistic. However sensible it might be to get the federal government out of direct cluster-specific subsidies or for provinces to abjure sector-specific tax credits, it’s really, really hard to imagine it ever happening. Forget theories of federalism – those programs win votes, and politicians don’t give up vote-winners easily.

Untouched in Creutzberg’s paper is the issue of how all those federal billions that go to university research play into our research and innovation system. That is likely going to be the centerpiece of today’s paper from the Expert Panel. There’s a serious air of anticipation about this report; despite rumours of a divided panel not a single leak has taken place, which in Ottawa is about as rare as a Senators’ playoff run. It should be interesting.

Tune in tomorrow for more.