Trudeau’s science funding feint angers Canadian researchers

The Trudeau administration has professed anew its commitment to university science – but in a way that revived condemnation from researchers long pleading for essential increases in funding for younger scientists.

The administration sent its employment and workforce development minister, Randy Boissonnault, to the University of Alberta “to announce major support for researchers and projects at universities across Canada”. There, Mr Boissonnault described for an audience of academic researchers an outlay of C$960 million (£560 million) for more than 4,700 scientists nationwide.

“You heard it, that's right – almost C$1 billion to support 4,700 researchers,” exclaimed Mr Boissonnault, a former lecturer at the university’s Campus Saint-Jean. “Today’s announcement,” he said, is about “making sure that Canada cements itself as a world leader in research and innovation.”

The Trudeau administration acknowledged afterwards, however, that the money already had been allocated and announced by the government, and that Mr Boissonnault was merely giving an update now that the individual grant recipients had been selected. The Boissonnault event “recognises their contributions” to Canada’s scientific wealth, a government spokesperson said afterwards.

While not a unique publicity tactic in governmental circles, the faux announcement in this instance – with the Trudeau team having flat-funded academic science for this year’s budget, and then having hinted at the possibility of maybe adding a mid-year supplement – hit the research community hard.

The Boissonnault announcement was disappointingly misleading at a time of major financial stress for academic researchers, declared Support Our Science, an advocacy group urging higher pay for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in Canada.

“It is frustrating to see that after years of advocacy efforts to increase funding for the next generation of researchers in Canada, the government continues to ignore this critical issue while using political spin disguised as action,” said the group’s executive director, Sarah Laframboise, a doctoral student at the University of Ottawa.

One of Canada’s top voices for academic science, David Naylor, a former president of the University of Toronto, had an even harsher take. “I would like to view this announcement as encouraging, but I fear it’s a shameless communications ploy,” Professor Naylor told Times Higher Education.

“My best guess,” Professor Naylor said of the likely reason for the Trudeau administration sleight, “is that some political operatives decided this was a dandy way to create the impression that researchers at all career stages – including many beleaguered graduate students and postdocs – are a bunch of ingrates who have nothing to complain about.”

Younger scientists are in fact grateful for the “substantial five-year programme of escalating reinvestment in base budgets for independent research” that prime minister Justin Trudeau announced in 2018, Professor Naylor said. But that money still left Canada well behind other nations in research support, he noted, and Mr Trudeau’s annual budget earlier this year did nothing to increase levels – even as Mr Trudeau received the findings of an expert panel that urged him to end decades of dangerous declines in governmental support for science.

That expert panel, assembled at the request of the Trudeau administration and led by Frédéric Bouchard, the dean of arts and sciences at the University of Montreal, recommended a 10 per cent annual increase over five years for the nation’s three main science funding councils.

The review panel noted that conditions are especially dire for younger scientists, as Canada has provided no increases for the past 20 years in the value of federal graduate student scholarships or postdoctoral fellowships.

Despite the disappointments, Professor Bouchard said in an interview after the Boissonnault event, it still remains possible the Trudeau administration might move soon to boost research funding. “I know that they’re working on different scenarios for implementation of some of the recommendations,” he said. “I do not know whether these scenarios will be implemented, or when.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com