CAUT has joined with the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, the Canadian Consortium for Research, the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, and the Canadian Graduate Council to propose a framework for action to the federal government for the funding of university research.
Last year CAUT, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada and the Canadian Consortium for Research drafted Putting Knowledge to Work, a series of policy recommendations for the federal government to deal with the funding crisis in university research. The government responded by announcing in the last fed-eral budget the creation of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, designed to provide funding capital of $800 million over the next five years for research infrastructure in universities and associated institutions.
The new coalition has switched focus to concentrate on support for research itself, researchers, and graduate students. In September the five organizations submitted Sustaining Canada as an Innovative Society: An Action Agenda to federal Industry Minister John Manley. In it they recommend the federal government increase the budgets of the Medical Research Council and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council by 50 per cent and that of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council by 60 per cent over the next four years. They suggest that 20 per cent of these funds go to graduate students, 25 per cent to partnership programs with end-users and the remaining funds to research support programs that seek to ensure that Canada has a broad base of research expertise.
The organizations also called on the government to strengthen the existing Intellectual Property Management Program of NSERC and to fund a new initiative for knowledge transfer in the social sciences and humanities called Community Research and Information Crossroads, a proposal put forward by the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada.
The plan also calls on the government to focus on research in a global economy. It points out that in order to prosper Canada must compete successfully on the international scene. In order to do this Canada must depend on informed strategies, and needs people who are truly knowledgeable about the economies, business structures, history, politics, cultures and languages of the rest of the world.
The action framework recommends "that the government recognize foreign area studies as a strategic research area and devote sufficient additional resources to establish the program" and that "additional resources be devoted to re-establish and strengthen" international collaborative research initiatives.
The document reminds the Liberal government of their repeated commitments to research and to science. It quotes a recent study commissioned by the National Science Foundation in the United States which revealed that 73 per cent of the papers cited in patents in the United States were the result of publicly-funded science. The study shows that this science is mainstream: quite basic, relatively recent, published in peer-reviewed journals, authored by researchers in universities and public research establishments and heavily supported by public funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. "This study plainly demonstrates that publicly-supported science is the driving force behind innovation and high tech industries. It also reveals that this industrial dependence on public science is growing rapidly, as innovation becomes increasingly driven by advances in scientific understanding."
The organizations point out that the contrast with the United States in terms of public funding is vivid. The Canadian government currently provides less support in real dollar terms for the three federal granting councils than it did in 1985. During the same period the U.S. government almost doubled its level of support for the National Institutes of Health, while increasing its support for the National Science Foundation by about one-third.
University research in Canada, the organizations say, is responsible for the production of $76 billion worth of goods and services, fully 12 per cent of the Canadian GDP, as well as sustaining one million jobs in this country.
What Canada needs, say the organizations, is to reverse the current trend of cuts in federal research funding and to increase federal support for research and discovery.
The Canadian Consortium for Research, of which CAUT is a founding member, will meet with government officials, MPs and ministers in November to publicize the framework for action and to lobby for the inclusion of the recommendations in the next federal budget.