Budget snub stuns Canada's top scientists
January 31, 2009
Joanna Frketich
The Hamilton Spectator
http://www.thespec.com/News/Local/article/505030
Millions of dollars and dozens of jobs are at stake in Hamilton after the federal budget gave no new money to Canada's top research funding agencies.
Fearful McMaster researchers say they don't know where they'll get the money to keep their work going if
Genome Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council have no new money to give.
"I was extremely saddened by it," said Dr. Salim Yusuf, executive director of Hamilton's Population Health Research Institute.
"The government does not seem to understand that the future of the country is at stake. With this huge stimulus package, to flatline research, which means essentially a cut in research, is disappointing and devastating to researchers."
Yusuf's research institute is the largest in Hamilton, employing about 240 people. It counts on federal grants for $2 million to $3 million in funding a year.
Researchers say this comes at the worst time because charitable organizations have cut their research grants due to a lack of donors during tough economic times. Henderson Research Centre has already had to let one of its 175 staff go and more could follow because a few of the centre's researchers are in danger of running out of funding. The centre gets around $1 million in federal grants annually.
"I was stunned," said Dr. Jeffrey Weitz, director of the centre. "There's so much money going out to things that seem so much less important when money should be given to creating the knowledge based economy."
Public Works Minister Christian Paradis said yesterday that there's no reason to be alarmed because supplementary funding was not announced as part of the budget.
Genome Canada will still get federal funding until 2013 as previously promised with $106 million this year and $108 million next year.
But it's unclear whether that is enough money to fund new projects or whether all of that money is already committed to current research projects.
CIHR, SSHRC and NSERC are also getting no new money added to the budget. In fact, they need to find $87.2 million in savings over the next three years.
"Everybody is shell shocked," said Elizabeth Weretilnyk, professor of biology at McMaster. "We can't imagine people would be so shortsighted." She's spent the last year preparing a $4-million grant proposal to Genome Canada to do research that would help produce more weatherproof crops.
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