I did a tour of Ottawa the week before last, chatting with folks about what the future looks like. Here are some of the things I kept hearing. Treat absolutely nothing in here as a prediction, this is all just gossip.
- The fin de regime atmosphere is overwhelming. It’s almost like the party scenes from Downfall. Just stick a fork in the Liberals, they’re done.
- Most of Ottawa that is not actually part of the public service also thinks the public service is broken beyond repair. It has got to the point where in some ways it’s not clear how any elected government could get anything done anymore.
- It has come to a number of people’s attention that the CEO positions at CIHR, NSERC, SSHRC and the Chief Science Officer are all either already up or up in the next 18 months? As in, the Tories might have a clean sweep of the Big Science Jobs in Ottawa when they come to office?
- Federal funding for the Future Skills Council is also up next year, and big chunks of funding for MITACS and (I think) BHER are also up in the next 24 months. 2026 could be quite a year.
- One potential outcome of the granting council reform that was kicked off by the Bouchard Report is the merger of SSHRC and NSERC into one big research outfit, roughly paralleling the way the National Science Foundation works in the United States (with a bit of humanities funding thrown in). I have no idea if this is true or not (and, following Paul Wells rule #1 of Canadian politics, I lean towards not) but it does seem to have some people quite worried.
- The prospects for significant granting council increases in this fiscal year seem fairly low. The predominant opinion seems to be money promised in the future (i.e. after the election), but only after some kind of reform of the granting council system.
- A lot of people seem to have been making contact with the Conservative Policy team, and have been favourably impressed, at least in the sense that the team members seem less combative than their boss.
Now that last one I found very interesting, and I think it’s worth going back to the Harper record on Science and Universities. A lot of you got quite angry with me a few years ago when I compared the Harper and Trudeau records on post-secondary education and wasn’t uniformly unfavourable to Harper. My final verdict was:
By any fair reading, the early Harper years were pretty good to higher education – in many ways better than the Trudeau years. Equally, by any fair reading, the late Harper years were pretty godawful; yes, the last two budgets contained some significant goodies, but they were projected many years out. If you want to denigrate the early Harper period, you could say it was merely the product of a booming economy and minority governments; if you want to boost the late Harper period, you could point out that restraint in spending is natural in the aftermath of huge expansionary budgets like those of 2009 and 2010 – it’s exactly what Dr. Keynes would have ordered.
I am fairly sure that a read of the last couple of Trudeau budgets would narrow the comparative gap between the two regimes even further. Neither government seems particularly enamored of the tri-councils, for instance. And the increase in investments in student aid—COVID era apart—actually look pretty similar, too.
So might a Poilievre government look a lot like a Harper government in terms of science? Well, yes and no. The Conservative Party has changed in the past decade. There is now an institutional hate-on for universities in a way that was not the case in the Harper era (Harper was much more concerned with government scientists than academic ones). But what at least rhymes is that the Poilievre Tories are at least rhetorically committed to investing in technology. Indeed, pretty much the entirety of their case against the Carbon Tax is that “technology will solve things.” I therefore think it’s fair to expect a significant bump in terms of money on technology generally, but clean tech in particular.
The question is, of course, how would a Conservative government spend a big whack of tech money?
Harper, of course, would probably have set up a boutique programme via the granting councils. He’d have got the councils to set up some kind of program to send money to universities, conditional on some kind of matching funding from business. I have a feeling, though, that a Poilievre government might reverse this: hand out money to businesses that require some kind of partnership with institutions. This would, in effect, force institutions to act as clients to businesses instead of “partners.”
Lots of people in universities will find this annoying/barbaric/a perversion of science etc. But I can see the arguments for doing good here. The one thing my informants in the private sector when it comes to innovation funding is that Canadian universities are really good at partnering with each other in order to divvy up government funds. But they are terrible at dealing with potential customers and end-users of technology. Basically, universities feel free to use “innovation” funds as “science” funds because universities interpret the word “innovation” to mean “new ideas” rather than “technology with genuine immediate applications,” which is how the rest of the world interprets the word.
But maybe that’s about to change? And maybe it’s not actually all that bad (certainly, this Is closer to how American universities actually operate, and they do ok on the whole science/discovery thing).
We’ll know more over the coming months, but those are my first thoughts about what a Poilievre science system might look like.
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A very naive question from the periphery: why is there such apathy (antipathy?) towards core Tri-Council in Ottawa? I can only assume that people with strong thoughts about this have at least some awareness of how (thesis-track) graduate education and postdoctoral training actually gets funded in this country—would they rather see all the eggs put in fewer baskets of their own overall choosing?
I have an expectation that the next gov would push for more applied/industry engaged research from universities too. What they may not realize is that this would be bad for economic growth. Basic research has larger effects on economic growth than applied research https://academic.oup.com/restud/article-abstract/88/1/1/5922649?redirectedFrom=fulltext. Universities have a comparative advantage in basic research, take advantage of that. Address the fact that Canada has very few world class large technology based by asking why they don’t want to be in Canada. Don’t pin in on universities. Use the evidence base to guide innovation policy for Canadians benefit. Don’t just choose another cool sounding expenditure program that the evidence base already shows won’t work – superclusters or more SRED $ to keep zombies alive.
Awarding research funds directly to companies instead of universities is a risky business.
First, I would like to refute the allegation that universities misappropriate “innovation” funds as “science” funds (basic science as opposed to applied science? because that is what I read into the comment).
I admit that I have only anecdotal or circumstantial evidence from colleagues in science and in engineering departments that programs like the NSERC Alliance program achieve the following objectives:
– Lead to the development of patents (yes, really).
– Lead to product advancement for Canadian companies.
– Provide livelihoods for students at critical stages of their careers, when they are looking for job opportunities.
– Provide companies with highly subsidized opportunities to recruit interns with the goal of potential hiring into permanent positions and early on-the-job training.
I do not have any reliable statistics, and one could always question how effective the programs are (how do you benchmark that? patents per $100k research funds? permanent job offers per $100k research funds?).
I do know colleagues, though, who hold patents from these programs, and I happen to know people who got jobs through these programs.
However, I also have very reliable evidence from applied researchers (I am not one of those) that enticing a company to participate in one of these programs can be a drag, even when the university researcher is very knowledgeable in the primary business portfolio of the company. These programs were often created to combat Canada’s lag in domestic economic innovation compared to other G7 countries, but a lot of this lag seems to come from within industry. Business is still going pretty well without major R&D investments (likely the reason why setting up university-industry partnerships in these programs can be a drag), and Canadian high-tech is often part of multi-national companies or business networks that do their R&D abroad.
None of this will change if the funds are awarded directly to industry. It will rather liberate whatever internal industrial funding is there for domestic R&D, for other objectives, primarily to increase the profit margin. So my skeptical guess is that awarding public research funds directly to industry would ultimately (indirectly) only subsidize shareholders’ and CEOs’ bank accounts.
PS: I talked to people who know these things much better than me or my colleagues. Three things that further complicate or hinder industry-university partnerships in innovation are
– For industry, these collaboration programs are often more recruitment programs than R&D programs, and if the industry is going through a contraction phase because existing personnel can easily cover product development and delivery demand, even small in-kind or financial or overhead contributions from their side make it not worth their while.
– There are apparently concerns from industry about confidentiality if there is serious R&D involved, and how some university partners handle intellectual property rights.
– For real interest in the R&D aspects, a proposal should already be quite advanced in terms of conception and primary design phases – the closer to the final design and testing phase, the better. That is a problem because it can require significant lead-up investment and time on the university side before an industry partner is willing to get on board.
Anyway, an interesting “little” set of problems on its own. And all the while the big challenge of operating universities as the primary institutions of higher teaching and learning is only getting more difficult with every new provincial and federal budget.
What about encouraging the private sector to send their employees for self-funded graduate studies? If the company is unwilling to subsidize the employee, then it says a lot about whether that they actually value R&D. Perhaps the firm is not stable enough financial situation to consider having in-house R&D, in which case they need to outsource their R&D to a university or the National Research Council (NRC) instead of focusing on technology. Encourage more universities to develop graduate degrees that are friendly for working professionals, such as McMaster’s industrial engineering PhD (https://www.eng.mcmaster.ca/programs/graduate-programs-degrees/industrial-phd/). By friendly, I mean online/distance or at least night-class learning and labs are made available for working professionals, and actual feedback from experienced university faculty or federal R&D scientists and engineers as the employee goes through one of these industrial-oriented thesis-based graduate degree. This is different than micro-credentials.
Instead of intervening in the market by picking winners, encourage firms to develop the culture of fostering their own employee’s education. If a company is actually interested in some R&D projects, they’ll likely start looking for a collaboration with the NRC or a university. They need to be at least willing to pay for some portion of their employee’s education. Don’t waste tax payer money to hire a bunch of program designers because you’ll be on the hook to hire a bunch of program evaluators, which prevents from these subsidary programs from being agile. Instead, just subsidize firms to develop a culture of investing in their employees so that they can grow their own R&D capabilities however they see fit. This is different then the typical “create more jobs and you get more funding” approach that doesn’t seem to be working for us. Also subsidize/encourage/use-the-stick-instead-of-the-carrot to universities that they need to update their education system so that it is realistic for modern knowledge workers to acquire actual R&D skills, experience, and culture via something like McMaster’s industrial PhD. It’d be nice if there was something like this for thesis-based masters, with a focus on improving their firm’s tech and learning best practices for R&D instead of obsessing over academic publishing. Universities might hate this because this means they don’t get to charge high international student fees, assuming that the employee who is doing such a PhD program qualifies for domestic student tuition rates. There are some ideas worth reading about in Dan Breznitz’s Innovations in Real Places book.
PS: There are promising semi-applied work done by academia-federal collaboration efforts that aren’t suitable for the average private sector firm (e.g., see https://nrc.canada.ca/en/research-development/research-collaboration/programs/challenge-programs). These efforts take time to spin-out start-ups or technology transfer to the private sector. It’d a shame if future administrations completely uproot what we already have instead of improving and supplementing them. I recommend keeping the innovation policies separate from the policies for developing semi-applied work into spin-outs/technology transfers, which is also different than policies for funding basic sciences.