There weren’t too many highlights in the 2024 budget as far as I was concerned. Overall, it was a bread and butter budget concerned with housing, jobs, business, and prices along with the government’s perennial focus on climate change and the future for young people and Indigenous peoples. There was nothing particularly special about the funds allocated for research and, as for defence spending in the 2024 budget, that was and is nominally interesting.
“Boosting Research, Innovation, and Productivity” was found in Chapter Four: Economic Growth for Every Generation.
4.1 Boosting Research, Innovation, and Productivity
For anyone who’s not familiar with ‘innovation’ as a buzzword, it’s code for ‘business’. From 4.1 of the budget,
Key Ongoing Actions
Supporting scientific discovery, developing Canadian research talent, and attracting top researchers from around the planet to make Canada their home base for their important work with more than $16 billion committed since 2016.
Supporting critical emerging sectors, through initiatives like the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, [emphases mine] the National Quantum Strategy, the Pan-Canadian Genomics Strategy, and the Biomanufacturing and Life Sciences Strategy.
Nearly $2 billion to fuel Canada’s Global Innovation Clusters to grow these innovation ecosystems, promote commercialization, support intellectual property creation and retention, and scale Canadian businesses.
Investing $3.5 billion in the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership to strengthen the innovation, competitiveness, and resiliency of the agriculture and agri-food sector.
Flowing up to $333 million over the next decade to support dairy sector investments in research, product and market development, and processing capacity for solids non-fat, thus increasing its competitiveness and productivity.
The only ’emerging’ sector singled out for new funding was the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy and that is almost all ‘innovation’, from 4.1 of the budget,
Strengthening Canada’s AI Advantage
Canada’s artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem is among the best in the world. Since 2017, the government has invested over $2 billion towards AI in Canada. Fuelled by those investments, Canada is globally recognized for strong AI talent, research, and its AI sector.
Today, Canada’s AI sector is ranked first in the world for growth of women in AI, and first in the G7 for year-over-year growth of AI talent. Every year since 2019, Canada has published the most AI-related papers, per capita, in the G7. Our AI firms are filing patents at three times the average rate in the G7, and they are attracting nearly a third of all venture capital in Canada. In 2022-23, there were over 140,000 actively engaged AI professionals in Canada, an increase of 29 per cent compared to the previous year. These are just a few of Canada’s competitive advantages in AI and we are aiming even higher.
To secure Canada’s AI advantage, the government has already:
Established the first national AI strategy in the world through the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy;
Supported access to advanced computing capacity, including through the recent signing of a letter of intent with NVIDIA and a Memorandum of Understanding with the U.K. government; and,
Scaled-up Canadian AI firms through the Strategic Innovation Fund and Global Innovation Clusters program.
Figure 4.1 Building on Canada’s AI Advantage
AI is a transformative economic opportunity for Canada and the government is committed to doing more to support our world-class research community, launch Canadian AI businesses, and help them scale-up to meet the demands of the global economy. The processing capacity required by AI is accelerating a global push for the latest technology, for the latest computing infrastructure.
Currently, most compute capacity is located in other countries. Challenges accessing compute power slows down AI research and innovation, and also exposes Canadian firms to a reliance on privately-owned computing, outside of Canada. This comes with dependencies and security risks. And, it is a barrier holding back our AI firms and researchers.
We need to break those barriers to stay competitive in the global AI race and ensure workers benefit from the higher wages of AI transformations; we must secure Canada’s AI advantage. We also need to ensure workers who fear their jobs may be negatively impacted by AI have the tools and skills training needed in a changing economy.
To secure Canada’s AI advantage Budget 2024 announces a monumental increase in targeted AI support of $2.4 billion, including:
$2 billion over five years, starting in 2024-25, to launch a new AI Compute Access Fund and Canadian AI Sovereign Compute Strategy, to help Canadian researchers, start-ups, and scale-up businesses access the computational power they need to compete and help catalyze the development of Canadian-owned and located AI infrastructure.
$200 million over five years, starting in 2024-25, to boost AI start-ups to bring new technologies to market, and accelerate AI adoption in critical sectors, such as agriculture, clean technology, health care, and manufacturing. This support will be delivered through Canada’s Regional Development Agencies.
$100 million over five years, starting in 2024-25, for the National Research Council’s AI Assist Program to help Canadian small- and medium-sized businesses and innovators build and deploy new AI solutions, potentially in coordination with major firms, to increase productivity across the country.
$50 million over four years, starting in 2025-26, to support workers who may be impacted by AI, such as creative industries. This support will be delivered through the Sectoral Workforce Solutions Program, which will provide new skills training for workers in potentially disrupted sectors and communities.
The government will engage with industry partners and research institutes to swiftly implement AI investment initiatives, fostering collaboration and innovation across sectors for accelerated technological advancement.
Before moving to the part of budget that focuses on safe and responsible use of AI, I’ve got some information about the legislative situation and an omnibus bill C-27 which covers AI, from my October 10, 2024 posting,
You can find more up-to-date information about the status of the Committee’s Bill-27 meetings on this webpage where it appears that September 26, 2024 was the committee’s most recent meeting. If you click on the highlighted meeting dates, you will be given the option of watching a webcast of the meeting. The webpage will also give you access to a list of witnesses, the briefs and the briefs themselves.
November 2024 update: The committee’s most recent meeting is still listed as September 26, 2024.
AI has tremendous economic potential, but as with all technology, it presents important considerations to ensure its safe development and implementation. Canada is a global leader in responsible AI and is supporting an AI ecosystem that promotes responsible use of technology. From development through to implementation and beyond, the government is taking action to protect Canadians from the potentially harmful impacts of AI.
The government is committed to guiding AI innovation in a positive direction, and to encouraging the responsible adoption of AI technologies by Canadians and Canadian businesses. To bolster efforts to ensure the responsible use of AI:
Budget 2024 proposes to provide $50 million over five years, starting in 2024-25, to create an AI Safety Institute of Canada to ensure the safe development and deployment of AI. The AI Safety Institute will help Canada better understand and protect against the risks of advanced and generative AI systems. The government will engage with stakeholders and international partners with competitive AI policies to inform the final design and stand-up of the AI Safety Institute.
Budget 2024 also proposes to provide $5.1 million in 2025-26 to equip the AI and Data Commissioner Office with the necessary resources to begin enforcing the proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act.
Budget 2024 proposes $3.5 million over two years, starting in 2024-25, to advance Canada’s leadership role with the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, securing Canada’s leadership on the global stage when it comes to advancing the responsible development, governance, and use of AI technologies internationally.
Using AI to Keep Canadians Safe
AI has shown incredible potential to toughen up security systems, including screening protocols for air cargo. Since 2012, Transport Canada has been testing innovative approaches to ensure that air cargo coming into Canada is safe, protecting against terrorist attacks. This included launching a pilot project to screen 10 to 15 per cent of air cargo bound for Canada and developing an artificial intelligence system for air cargo screening.
Budget 2024 proposes to provide $6.7 million over five years, starting in 2024-25, to Transport Canada to establish the Pre-Load Air Cargo Targeting Program to screen 100 per cent of air cargo bound for Canada. This program, powered by cutting-edge artificial intelligence, will increase security and efficiency, and align Canada’s air security regime with those of its international partners.
There was a small section which updates some information about intellectual property retention (patent box retention) but otherwise is concerned with industrial R&B (a perennial Canadian weakness), from 4.1 of the budget,
Boosting R&D and Intellectual Property Retention
Research and development (R&D) is a key driver of productivity and growth. Made-in-Canada innovations meaningfully increase our gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, create good-paying jobs, and secure Canada’s position as a world-leading advanced economy.
To modernize and improve the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax incentives, the federal government launched consultations on January 31, 2024, to explore cost-neutral ways to enhance the program to better support innovative businesses and drive economic growth. In these consultations, which closed on April 15, 2024, the government asked Canadian researchers and innovators for ways to better deliver SR&ED support to small- and medium-sized Canadian businesses and enable the next generation of innovators to scale-up, create jobs, and grow the economy.
Budget 2024 announces the government is launching a second phase of consultations on more specific policy parameters, to hear further views from businesses and industry on specific and technical reforms. This includes exploring how Canadian public companies could be made eligible for the enhanced credit. Further details on the consultation process will be released shortly on the Department of Finance Canada website.
Budget 2024 proposes to provide $600 million over four years, starting in 2025-26, with $150 million per year ongoing for future enhancements to the SR&ED program. The second phase of consultations will inform how this funding could be targeted to boost research and innovation.
On January 31, 2024, the government also launched consultations on creating a patent box regime to encourage the development and retention of intellectual property in Canada. The patent box consultation closed on April 15, 2024. Submissions received through this process, which are still under review, will help inform future government decisions with respect to a patent box regime.
Nice to get an update on what’s happening with the patent box regime.
The Tri-Council consisting of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) don’t often get mentioned in the federal budget but they did this year, from 4.1 of the budget,
Enhancing Research Support
Since 2016, the federal government has committed more than $16 billion in research, including funding for the federal granting councils—the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
This research support enables groundbreaking discoveries in areas such as climate change, health emergencies, artificial intelligence, and psychological health. This plays a critical role in solving the world’s greatest challenges, those that will have impacts for generations.
Canada’s granting councils already do excellent work within their areas of expertise, but more needs to be done to maximize their effect. The improvements we are making today, following extensive consultations including with the Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System, will strengthen and modernize Canada’s federal research support.
To increase core research grant funding and support Canadian researchers, Budget 2024 proposes to provide $1.8 billion over five years, starting in 2024-25, with $748.3 million per year ongoing to SSHRC, NSERC, and CIHR.
To provide better coordination across the federally funded research ecosystem, Budget 2024 announces the government will create a new capstone research funding organization. The granting councils will continue to exist within this new organization, and continue supporting excellence in investigator-driven research, including linkages with the Health portfolio. This new organization and structure will also help to advance internationally collaborative, multi-disciplinary, and mission-driven research. The government is delivering on the Advisory Panel’s observation that more coordination is needed to maximize the impact of federal research support across Canada’s research ecosystem.
To help guide research priorities moving forward, Budget 2024 also announces the government will create an advisory Council on Science and Innovation. This Council will be made up of leaders from the academic, industry, and not-for-profit sectors, and be responsible for a national science and innovation strategy to guide priority setting and increase the impact of these significant federal investments.
Budget 2024 also proposes to provide a further $26.9 million over five years, starting in 2024-25, with $26.6 million in remaining amortization and $6.6 million ongoing, to the granting councils to establish an improved and harmonized grant management system.
The government will also work with other key players in the research funding system—the provinces, territories, and Canadian industry—to ensure stronger alignment, and greater co-funding to address important challenges, notably Canada’s relatively low level of business R&D investment.
More details on these important modernization efforts will be announced in the 2024 Fall Economic Statement.
World-Leading Research Infrastructure
Modern, high-quality research facilities and infrastructure are essential for breakthroughs in Canadian research and science. These laboratories and research centres are where medical and other scientific breakthroughs are born, helping to solve real-world problems and create the economic opportunities of the future. World-leading research facilities will attract and train the next generation of scientific talent. That’s why, since 2015, the federal government has made unprecedented investments in science and technology, at an average of $13.6 billion per year, compared to the average from 2009-10 to 2015-16 of just $10.8 billion per year. But we can’t stop here.
To advance the next generation of cutting-edge research, Budget 2024 proposes major research and science infrastructure investments, including:
$399.8 million over five years, starting in 2025-26, to support TRIUMF, Canada’s sub-atomic physics research laboratory, located on the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus. This investment will upgrade infrastructure at the world’s largest cyclotron particle accelerator, positioning TRIUMF, and the partnering Canadian research universities, at the forefront of physics research and enabling new medical breakthroughs and treatments, from drug development to cancer therapy.
$176 million over five years, starting in 2025‑26, to CANARIE, a national not-for-profit organization that manages Canada’s ultra high-speed network to connect researchers, educators, and innovators, including through eduroam. With network speeds hundreds of times faster, and more secure, than conventional home and office networks, this investment will ensure this critical infrastructure can connect researchers across Canada’s world-leading post-secondary institutions.
$83.5 million over three years, starting in 2026-27 to extend support to Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon. Funding will continue the important work at the only facility of its kind in Canada. A synchrotron light source allows scientists and researchers to examine the microscopic nature of matter. This specialized infrastructure contributes to breakthroughs in areas ranging from climate-resistant crop development to green mining processes.
$45.5 million over five years, starting in 2024-25, to support the Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Research Institute, a network of universities and institutes that coordinate astroparticle physics expertise. Headquartered at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, the institute builds on the legacy of Dr. McDonald’s 2015 Nobel Prize for his work on neutrino physics. These expert engineers, technicians, and scientists design, construct, and operate the experiments conducted in Canada’s underground and underwater research infrastructure, where research into dark matter and other mysterious particles thrives. This supports innovation in areas like clean technology and medical imaging, and educates and inspires the next wave of Canadian talent.
$30 million over three years, starting in 2024-25, to support the completion of the University of Saskatchewan’s Centre for Pandemic Research at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Saskatoon. This investment will enable the study of high-risk pathogens to support vaccine and therapeutic development, a key pillar in Canada’s Biomanufacturing and Life Sciences Strategy. Of this amount, $3 million would be sourced from the existing resources of Prairies Economic Development Canada.
These new investments build on existing federal research support:
The Strategic Science Fund, which announced the results of its first competition in December 2023, providing support to 24 third-party science and research organizations starting in 2024-25;
Canada recently concluded negotiations to be an associate member of Horizon Europe, which would enable Canadians to access a broader range of research opportunities under the European program starting this year; and,
The steady increase in federal funding for extramural and intramural science and technology by the government which was 44 per cent higher in 2023 relative to 2015.
…
Advancing Space Research and Exploration
Canada is a leader in cutting-edge innovation and technologies for space research and exploration. Our astronauts make great contributions to international space exploration missions. The government is investing in Canada’s space research and exploration activities.
Budget 2024 proposes to provide $8.6 million in 2024-25 to the Canadian Space Agency for the Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program to support Canada’s world-class space industry and help accelerate the development of new technologies. This initiative empowers Canada to leverage space to solve everyday challenges, such as enhancing remote health care services and improving access to healthy food in remote communities, while also supporting Canada’s human space flight program.
Budget 2024 announces the establishment of a new whole-of-government approach to space exploration, technology development, and research. The new National Space Council will enable the level of collaboration required to secure Canada’s future as a leader in the global space race, addressing cross-cutting issues that span commercial, civil, and defence domains. This will also enable the government to leverage Canada’s space industrial base with its world-class capabilities, workforce, and track record of innovation and delivery.
I found two responses to the budget from two science organizations and the responses fall into the moderately pleased category. Here’s an April 17, 2024 news release from Evidence for Democracy (E4D), Note: Links have been removed,
As a leading advocate for evidence-informed decision-making and the advancement of science policy in Canada, Evidence for Democracy (E4D) welcomes the budget’s emphasis on scientific research and innovation. Since its inception, E4D has been at the forefront of advocating for policies that support robust scientific research and its integration into public policy. To support this work, we have compiled a budget analysis for the science and research sector here for more context on Budget 2024.
“Budget 2024 provides an encouraging investment into next generation researchers and research support systems,” says Sarah Laframboise, Executive Director of E4D, “By prioritizing investments in research talent, infrastructure, and innovation, the government is laying the foundation for a future driven by science and evidence.”
The budget’s initiatives to enhance graduate student scholarships and postdoctoral fellowships reflect a commitment to nurturing Canada’s research talent, a cornerstone of E4D’s advocacy efforts through its role on the Coalition for Canadian Research. E4D is encouraged by this investment in next generation researchers and core research grants, who form the bedrock of scientific discovery and drive innovation across sectors. Additionally, the formation of a new capstone research funding organization and Advisory Council on Science and Innovation are signs of a strategic vision that values Canadian science and research.
While Budget 2024 represents a significant step forward for science and research in Canada, E4D recognizes that challenges and opportunities lie ahead.
“We note that funding for research in Budget 2024 is heavily back-loaded, with larger funding values coming into effect in a few years time,” adds Laframboise, “Given that this also includes significant structural and policy changes, this leaves some concern over the execution and roll-out of these investments in practice.”
As the details of the budget initiatives unfold, E4D remains committed to monitoring developments, advocating for evidence-based policies, and engaging with stakeholders to ensure that science continues to thrive as a driver of progress and prosperity in Canada.
The April 16, 2024 E4D budget analysis by Farah Qaiser, Nada Salem, Sarah Laframboise, Simarpreet Singh is here. The authors provide more detail than I do.
The second response to the 2024 budget is from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is posted on a federal government website, from an April 29, 2024 letter, Note: Links have been removed,
Dear colleagues,
On April 16, 2024, the Government of Canada released Budget 2024 – Fairness for Every Generation – a Budget that proposes a historic level of investment in research and innovation. Most notably for CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC, this included $1.8 billion in core research grant funding over five years (starting in 2024-25, with $748.3 million per year ongoing). This proposed investment recognizes the vital role played by research in improving the lives of Canadians. We are thrilled by the news of this funding and will share more details about how and when these funds will be distributed as the Budget process unfolds.
Budget 2024 also proposes $825 million over five years (starting in 2024-25, with $199.8 million per year ongoing) to increase the annual value of master’s and doctoral student scholarships to $27,000 and $40,000, respectively, and post-doctoral fellowships to $70,000. This will also increase the number of research scholarships and fellowships provided, building to approximately 1,720 more graduate students or fellows benefiting each year. To make it easier for students and fellows to access support, the enhanced suite of scholarships and fellowship programs will be streamlined into one talent program. These proposals are the direct result of a coordinated effort to recognize the importance of students in the research ecosystem.
The Budget proposes other significant investments in health research, including providing:
a further $26.9 million over five years (starting in 2024-25, with $26.6 million in remaining amortization and $6.6 million ongoing) to the granting councils to establish an improved and harmonized grant management system.
$10 million in 2024-2025 for CIHR to support an endowment to increase prize values awarded by the Gairdner Foundation for excellence in health research.
$80 million over five years for Health Canada to support the Brain Canada Foundation in its advancement of brain research.
$30 million over three years (starting in 2024-25) to support Indigenous participation in research, with $10 million each for First Nation, Métis, and Inuit partners.
$2 billion over five years (starting in 2024-25) to launch a new AI Compute Access Fund and Canadian AI Sovereign Compute Strategy, to help Canadian researchers, start-ups, and scale-up businesses access the computational power they need to compete and help catalyze the development of Canadian-owned and located AI infrastructure.
As well, to help guide research priorities moving forward, Budget 2024 announces that the government will create an Advisory Council on Science and Innovation. This Council will be comprised of leaders from the academic, industry, and not-for-profit sectors, and will be responsible for a national science and innovation strategy to guide priority setting and increase the impact of these significant federal investments.
In addition to these historic investments, Budget 2024 includes a proposal to create a “new capstone research funding organization” that will provide improved coordination across the federally funded research ecosystem. This proposal stems directly from the recommendations of the Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System, and recognizes the need for more strategic coordination in the federal research system. The Budget notes that the granting councils will each continue to exist within this new organization, and continue supporting excellence in investigator-driven research, including linkages with the Health portfolio. While the governance implications of this new organization are not known at this time, the CIHR Institutes will remain in place as an integral part of CIHR. As stated in the Budget, the timing and details with respect to the creation of this organization still need to be determined, but it did indicate that more details will be announced in the 2024 Fall Economic Statement.
As well, CIHR will be working closely with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Health Canada, and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada in the coming months to implement various Budget measures related to research. In the meantime, CIHR will continue its business as usual.
These announcements and investments are significant and unprecedented and will create exciting opportunities for the Tri-Agencies and other partners across the federal research ecosystem to contribute to the health, social, and economic needs and priorities of Canadians. They will also ensure that Canada remains a world leader in science. This is positive and welcome news for the CIHR community. We look forward to embarking on this new journey with Canada’s health research community.
Tammy Clifford, PhD Acting President, CIHR
Defence
I have taken to including information about the funding for the military on the grounds that the military has historically been the source of much science, medical, and technology innovation. (Television anyone?)
As the world becomes increasingly unstable, as climate change increases the severity and frequency of natural disasters, and as the risk of conflict grows, Canada is asking more of our military. Whether it is deploying to Latvia as part of Operation REASSURANCE, or Nova Scotia as part of Operation LENTUS, those who serve in the Canadian Armed Forces have answered the call whenever they are needed, to keep Canadians safe.
On April 8 [2024], in response to the rapidly changing security environment, the government announced an update to its defence policy: Our North, Strong and Free. In this updated policy, the government laid out its vision for Canada’s national defence, which will ensure the safety of Canadians, our allies, and our partners by equipping our soldiers with the cutting-edge tools and advanced capabilities they need to keep Canadians safe in a changing world.
Budget 2024 proposes foundational investments of $8.1 billion over five years, starting in 2024-25, and $73.0 billion over 20 years to the Department of National Defence (DND), the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), and Global Affairs Canada (GAC) to ensure Canada is ready to respond to global threats and to protect the well-being of Canadian Armed Forces members. Canada’s defence spending-to-GDP ratio is expected to reach 1.76 per cent by 2029-30. These include:
$549.4 million over four years, starting in 2025-26, with $267.8 billion in future years, for DND to replace Canada’s worldwide satellite communications equipment; for new tactical helicopters, long-range missile capabilities for the Army, and airborne early warning aircraft; and for other investments to defend Canada’s sovereignty;
$1.9 billion over five years, starting in 2024-25, with $8.2 billion in future years, for DND to extend the useful life of the Halifax-class frigates and extend the service contract of the auxiliary oiler replenishment vessel, while Canada awaits delivery of next generation naval vessels;
$1.4 billion over five years, starting in 2024-25, with $8.2 billion in future years, for DND to replenish its supplies of military equipment;
$1.8 billion over five years, starting in 2024-25, with $7.7 billion in future years, for DND to build a strategic reserve of ammunition and scale up the production of made-in-Canada artillery ammunition. Private sector beneficiaries are expected to contribute to infrastructure and retooling costs;
$941.9 million over four years, starting in 2025-26, with $16.2 billion in future years, for DND to ensure that military infrastructure can support modern equipment and operations;
$917.4 million over five years, starting in 2024-25, with $10.9 billion in future years and $145.8 million per year ongoing, for CSE and GAC to enhance their intelligence and cyber operations programs to protect Canada’s economic security and respond to evolving national security threats;
$281.3 million over five years, starting in 2024-25, with $216 million in future years, for DND for a new electronic health record platform for military health care;
$6.9 million over four years, starting in 2025-26, with $1.4 billion in future years, for DND to build up to 1,400 new homes and renovate an additional 2,500 existing units for Canadian Armed Forces personnel on bases across Canada (see Chapter 1);
$100 million over five years, starting in 2024-25, to DND for child care services for Canadian Armed Forces personnel and their families (see Chapter 2);
$149.9 million over four years, starting in 2025-26, with $1.8 billion in future years, for DND to increase the number of civilian specialists in priority areas; and,
$52.5 million over five years, starting in 2024-25, with $54.8 million in future years, to DND to support start-up firms developing dual-use technologies critical to our defence via the NATO Innovation Fund.
To support Our North, Strong and Free, $156.7 million over three years, starting in 2026-27, and $537.7 million in future years would be allocated from funding previously committed to Canada’s 2017 Defence Policy, Strong, Secure, Engaged.
Budget 2024 also proposes additional measures to strengthen Canada’s national defence:
$1.2 billion over 20 years, starting in 2024-25, to support the ongoing procurement of critical capabilities, military equipment, and infrastructure through DND’s Capital Investment Fund; and,
$66.5 million over five years, starting in 2024-25, with $7.4 billion in future years to DND for the Future Aircrew Training program to develop the next generation of Royal Canadian Air Force personnel. Of this amount, $66.5 million over five years, starting in 2024-25, would be sourced from existing DND resources.
Budget 2024 also announces reforms to Canadian defence policy and its review processes:
Committing Canada to undertake a Defence Policy Review every four years, as part of a cohesive review of the National Security Strategy; and,
Undertaking a review of Canada’s defence procurement system.
With this proposed funding, since 2022, the government has committed more than $125 billion over 20 years in incremental funding to strengthen national defence and help keep Canadians and our democracy safe in an increasingly unpredictable world—today and for generations. Since 2015, this adds up to over $175 billion in incremental funding for national defence.
Enhancing CSIS Intelligence Capabilities
As an advanced economy and an open and free democracy, Canada continues to be targeted by hostile actors, which threaten our democratic institutions, diaspora communities, and economic prosperity. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) protects Canadians from threats, such as violent extremism and foreign interference, through its intelligence operations in Canada and around the world.
To equip CSIS to combat emerging global threats and keep pace with technological developments, further investments in intelligence capabilities and infrastructure are needed. These will ensure CSIS can continue to protect Canadians.
Budget 2024 proposes to provide $655.7 million over eight years, starting in 2024-25, with $191.1 million in remaining amortization, and $114.7 million ongoing to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to enhance its intelligence capabilities, and its presence in Toronto.
Maintaining a Robust Arctic Presence
The Canadian Arctic is warming four times faster than the world average, as a result of climate change. It is also where we share a border with today’s most hostile nuclear power—Russia. The shared imperatives of researching climate change where its impacts are most severe, and maintaining an ongoing presence in the Arctic enable Canada to advance this important scientific work and assert our sovereignty.
Maintaining a robust research presence supports Canada’s Arctic sovereignty. Scientific and research operations in the Arctic advance our understanding of how climate change is affecting people, the economy, and the environment in the region. This is an important competitive advantage, as economic competition increases in the region.
To support research operations in Canada’s North, Budget 2024 proposes:
$46.9 million over five years starting in 2024-25, with $8.5 million in remaining amortization and $11.1 million ongoing, to Natural Resources Canada to renew the Polar Continental Shelf Program to continue supporting northern research logistics, such as lodging and flights for scientists; and,
$3.5 million in 2024-25 to Polar Knowledge Canada to support its activities, including the operation of the Canadian High Arctic Research Station.
…
Protecting Canadians from Financial Crimes
Financial crimes are serious threats to public safety, national security, and Canada’s financial system. They can range from terrorist financing, corruption, and the evasion of sanctions, to money laundering, fraud, and tax evasion. These crimes have real world implications, often enabling other criminal behaviour. Financial crime also undermines the fairness and transparency that are so essential to our economy.
Since 2017, the government has undertaken significant work to crack down on financial crime:
Investing close to $320 million since 2019 to strengthen compliance, financial intelligence, information sharing, and investigative capacity to support money laundering investigations;
Creating new Integrated Money Laundering Investigative Teams in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec, which convene experts to advance investigations into money laundering, supported by dedicated forensic accounting experts;
Launching a publicly accessible beneficial ownership registry for federal corporations on January 22, 2024. The government continues to call upon provinces and territories to advance a pan-Canadian approach to beneficial ownership transparency;
Modernizing Canada’s anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing framework to adapt to emerging technologies; vulnerable sectors; and growing risks such as sanctions evasion; and,
Establishing public-private partnerships with the financial sector, that are improving the detection and disruption of profit-oriented crimes, including human trafficking, online child sexual exploitation, and fentanyl trafficking.
Budget 2024 takes further action to protect Canadians from financial crimes.
Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Terrorist Financing
Criminal and terrorist organizations continually look for new ways to perpetrate illicit activities. Canada needs a robust legal framework that keeps pace with evolving financial crimes threats.
To combat money laundering, terrorist financing, and sanctions evasion, Budget 2024 announces:
The government intends to introduce legislative amendments to the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act (PCMLTFA), the Criminal Code the Income Tax Act, and the Excise Tax Act.
Proposed amendments to the PCMLTFA would:
Enhance the ability of reporting entities under the PCMLTFA to share information with each other to detect and deter money laundering, terrorist financing, and sanctions evasion, while maintaining privacy protections for personal information, including an oversight role for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner under regulations;
Permit the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) to disclose financial intelligence to provincial and territorial civil forfeiture offices to support efforts to seize property linked to unlawful activity; and, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to strengthen the integrity of Canada’s citizenship process;
Enable anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing regulatory obligations to cover factoring companies, cheque cashing businesses, and leasing and finance companies to close a loophole and level the playing field across businesses providing financial services;
Allow FINTRAC to publicize more information around violations of obligations under the PCMLTFA when issuing administrative monetary penalties to strengthen transparency and compliance; and,
Make technical amendments to close loopholes and correct inconsistencies.
Proposed amendments to the Criminal Code would:
Allow courts to issue an order to require a financial institution to keep an account open to assist in the investigation of a suspected criminal offence; and,
Allow courts to issue a repeating production order to authorize law enforcement to obtain ongoing, specified information on activity in an account or multiple accounts connected to a person of interest in a criminal investigation.
Proposed amendments to the Income Tax Act and Excise Tax Act would:
Ensure Canada Revenue Agency officials who carry out criminal investigations are authorized to seek general warrants through court applications, thereby modernizing and simplifying evidence gathering processes and helping to fight tax evasion and other financial crimes.
Canada Financial Crimes Agency
As announced in Budget 2023, the Canada Financial Crimes Agency (CFCA) will become Canada’s lead enforcement agency against financial crime. It will bring together expertise necessary to increase money laundering charges, prosecutions, and convictions, and the seizure of criminal assets.
Budget 2024 proposes to provide $1.7 million over two years, starting in 2024-25, to the Department of Finance to finalize the design and legal framework for the CFCA.
Fighting Trade-Based Fraud and Money Laundering
Trade-based financial crime is one of the most pervasive means of laundering money; it’s estimated that this is how hundreds of millions of dollars are laundered each year. To strengthen efforts to fight trade fraud and money laundering, the 2023Fall Economic Statement announced enhancements to the Canada Border Services Agency’s authorities under the PCMLTFA to combat trade-based financial crime and the intent to create a Trade Transparency Unit.
Budget 2024 builds on this work by proposing to provide $29.9 million over five years, starting in 2024-25, with $5.1 million in remaining amortization and $4.2 million ongoing, for the Canada Border Services Agency to support the implementation of its new authorities under the PCMLTFA to combat financial crime and strengthen efforts to combat international financial crime with our allies.
Supporting Veterans’ Well-Being
After their service and their sacrifice, veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces deserve our full support. Veterans’ organizations are often best placed to understand the needs of veterans and to develop programming that improves their quality of life. In 2018, the federal government launched the Veteran and Family Well-Being Fund, which provides funding to public, private, and academic organizations, to advance research projects and innovative approaches to deliver services to veterans and their families.
Budget 2024 proposes to provide an additional $6 million over three years, starting in 2024-25, to Veterans Affairs Canada for the Veteran and Family Well-Being Fund. A portion of the funding will focus on projects for Indigenous, women, and 2SLGBTQI+ veterans.
Telemedicine Services for Veterans and Their Families
After serving in the Canadian Armed Forces, many veterans who previously received their health care from the Forces need to find a family doctor in the provincial system, which makes their transition to civilian life more stressful, especially if they need health care for service-related injuries.
To ensure veterans and their families have access to the care they deserve after their service to Canada:
Budget 2024 proposes to provide $9.3 million over five years, starting in 2024-25, to Veterans Affairs Canada to extend and expand the Veteran Family Telemedicine Service pilot for another three years. This initiative will provide up to two years of telemedicine services to recent veterans and their families.
The system of rules and institutions that were established in the wake of the Second World War unleashed an era of prosperity unprecedented in human history. This era generated a massive expansion of global trade, and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. As a trading nation with privileged access to more than two-thirds of the global economy, Canada has benefitted enormously from the stability and certainty that this system provided.
Supply chain disruptions and rising protectionism threaten this Canadian advantage that has been enjoyed for generations. Canada is taking action to make sure we preserve the rules-based international order. We are strengthening our trade relationships and making sure they reflect our values. We are ensuring our economy is resilient and secure, protecting Canadians and Canada from economic pressure from authoritarian regimes, and defending Canada’s economic interests.
Budget 2024 makes investments to ensure the opportunities and prosperity of trade, enjoyed by generations of Canadians, continue to be there for every generation.
Key Ongoing Actions
Launching in 2017 Strong, Secure, Engaged, to maintain the Canadian Armed Forces as an agile, multi-purpose, combat-ready force, ensuring Canada is strong domestically, an active partner in North America, and engaged internationally.
Upholding Canada’s 15 free trade agreements with 51 countries. Canada is the only G7 country with comprehensive trade and investment agreements with all other G7 members.
Implementing the modernized Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement and the United Kingdom’s accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Establishing a new Canada-Taiwan foreign investment promotion and protection arrangement in December 2023.
Launching Canada’s Indo-Pacific Strategy in November 2022, committing almost $2.3 billion to strengthen Canada’s role as a strong partner in the region. The strategy included:
$492.9 million over five years to reinforce Canada’s Indo-Pacific naval presence and increase Canadian Armed Forces participation in regional military exercises.
$227.8 million over five years to increase Canada’s work with partners in the region on national security, cyber security, and responses to crime, terrorism, and threats from weapons proliferation.
Canada is negotiating free trade agreements with Indonesia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to provide additional trade and investment opportunities in the Indo-Pacific region.
To further reinforce Canada’s role as a trusted supply chain partner, and its commitment to cooperate with like-minded partners in meeting emerging global challenges, including the economic resilience of the world’s democracies, Canada undertook the following actions:
Joined with the U.S. in the Energy Transformation Task Force to accelerate cooperation on critical clean energy opportunities and to strengthen integrated Canada-U.S. supply chains, which as announced in Chapter 4, has been extended for another year.
Canada signed a new agreement in May 2023 with South Korea for cooperation on critical mineral supply chains, clean energy transition, and energy security.
Canada endorsed the Joint Declaration Against Trade-Related Economic Coercion and Non-Market Policies and Practices with Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S. in June 2023.
Protecting Canadian Businesses from Unfair Foreign Competition
Canadian companies and workers are able to do business around the world, selling their goods and expertise, because the government has delivered free trade agreements that cover 61 per cent of the world’s GDP and 1.5 billion consumers. This means Canadians can do business in Japan and Malaysia with the CPTPP; in Europe with CETA; in the United States and Mexico with the new NAFTA; and in Ukraine with a modernized CUFTA. These agreements mean good jobs and good salaries for people across the country.
However, this is only true when Canadian workers and businesses are competing on an even playing field, and countries respect agreed trade rules.
That is why the government has taken steps to ensure that Canada’s trade remedy and import monitoring systems have the tools needed to defend Canadian workers and businesses from unfair practices of foreign competitors. For instance, earlier this year, Canada introduced a system to track the countries steel imports are initially melted and poured in, to increase supply chain transparency and support effective enforcement of Canada’s trade laws.
Budget 2024 proposes to provide $10.5 million over three years, starting in 2024-25, for the Canada Border Services Agency to create a dedicated Market Watch Unit to monitor and update trade remedy measures annually, to protect Canadian workers and businesses from unfair trade practices, and ensure greater transparency and market predictability.
Ensuring Reciprocal Treatment for Canadian Businesses Abroad
Canada is taking action to protect Canadian businesses and workers from additional global economic and trade challenges. These challenges include protectionist and non-market policies and practices implemented by our trading partners. When Canada opens its markets to goods and services from other countries, we expect those countries to equally grant Canadian businesses the access that we provide their companies.
As detailed in the Policy Statement on Ensuring Reciprocal Treatment for Canadian Businesses Abroad, published alongside the 2023 Fall Economic Statement, Canada will consider reciprocity as a key design element for new policies going forward. This approach builds on Canada’s commitment to implement reciprocal procurement policies, including for infrastructure and sub-national infrastructure spending, in the near term. A reciprocal lens will also be applied to a range of new measures including, but not limited to, investment tax incentives, grants and contributions, technical barriers to trade, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, investment restrictions, and intellectual property requirements.
In pursuing reciprocity, Canada will continue working with its allies to introduce incentives for businesses to reorient supply chains to trusted, reliable partners, and will ensure that any new measures do not unnecessarily harm trading partners who do not discriminate against Canadian goods and suppliers.
Protecting Critical Supply Chains
Recent events around the world, from the pandemic to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, have exposed strategic vulnerabilities in critical supply chains, to which Canada and countries around the world are responding by derisking, or friendshoring, their supply chains. Canada is actively working with its allies to strengthen shared supply chains and deepen our economic ties with trusted partners, including in the context of accelerating the transition to a net-zero economy.
Ongoing efforts to build our critical supply chains through democracies like our own represent a significant economic opportunity for Canadian businesses and workers, and the government will continue to design domestic policies and programs with friendshoring as a top-of-mind objective.
To reinforce Canada’s role as a trusted supply chain partner for our allies, Budget 2023 took action to mobilize private investment and grow Canada’s economy towards net-zero. These investments are growing Canada’s economic capacity in industries across the economy, while simultaneously reducing Canada’s emissions and strengthening our essential trading relationships.
Eradicating Forced Labour from Canadian Supply Chains
Canada is gravely concerned by the ongoing human rights violations against Uyghurs and Muslim minorities in China, as well as by the use of forced labour around the world.
Budget 2024 reaffirms the federal government’s commitment to introduce legislation in 2024 to eradicate forced labour from Canadian supply chains and to strengthen the import ban on goods produced with forced labour. The government will also work to ensure existing legislation fits within the overall framework to safeguard our supply chains.
This will build on funding committed in the 2023 Fall Economic Statement that, starting January 1, 2024, supports the requirement for annual reporting from public and private entities to demonstrate measures they have taken to prevent and reduce the risk that forced labour is used in their supply chains.
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Before moving on to an interesting analysis of the defence portion of the 2024 budget by someone else, here’s a link to the national defence policy, Our North, Strong and Free: A Renewed Vision for Canada’s Defence, which was released on April 8, 2024 just days before the April 16, 2024 release date for this latest federal budget.
It seems there was a shift in policy during the nine-day interval. From Murray Brewster’s April 16, 2024 article for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) news online website, Note: Links have been removed,
The new federal budget promises good things will happen at the Department of National Defence … next year, and hopefully in the years after.
The new fiscal plan, presented Tuesday by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, marks a subtle but significant shift from what was proposed in last week’s long-awaited defence policy [emphasis mine], which committed to spending an additional $8.1 billion on defence.
The funding envelope in the budget earmarks the same amount but includes not only the defence department but proposed spending on both the Communications Security Establishment — the country’s electronic spy agency — and Global Affairs Canada. [emphases mine]
While the overall defence budget is expected to increase marginally in the current fiscal year to $33.8 billion, defence experts told CBC News that when the internal cost-cutting exercise ordered by the Liberal government and the new defence policy are factored in, the military can expect roughly $635 million less this year [emphasis mine] than was anticipated before spending restraint kicked in.
Freeland’s fiscal plan projects a 30 per cent increase in defence spending in the next fiscal year, bringing it to $44.2 billion.
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This is how I understand what Brewster is saying:
2024/25 defence budget as listed is $33.8B
Not all of this money is going directly to defence (the Communications Security Establishment and Global Affairs Canada will be partaking)
the defence department has been ordered to cut costs
so, there will be $635M less than defence might have expected
in 2025/26 defence spending will be increased to $44.2 billion, whatever that means
That’s quite the dance and Brewster’s April 16, 2024 article points out at least one more weakness,
Sahir Khan, the executive vice-president of the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy, said he would love to see the specifics.
“That’s one of the difficulties, I think, with this government is we have seen a lot of aspiration, but not always the perspiration,” said Khan, a former deputy parliamentary budget officer. “What is the plan to achieve the results?”
The politically charged promise to increase Canada’s defence spending to 1.76 per cent of the gross domestic product by the end of the decade could be left in doubt when the spending plans are laid alongside the budget’s economic projections during that time frame.
Generally, the better the economy does, the more the defence budget would have to be increased to meet the target.
“It’s really unclear how we actually get to 1.76 per cent of GDP, if you take the figures that are presented which outline how spending is going to increase,” said Dave Perry, a defence expert and president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.
“You can’t put that against the nominal GDP projection provided in the budget” and then add in other government departments, such as Veterans Affairs Canada, “and get anywhere close” to the GDP projection in the defence policy, he said.
About five weeks after the budget was released, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau received a letter, from a May 23, 2024 article by Alexander Panetta for CBC News online,
Nearly one-quarter of the members of the United States Senate have sent an unusually critical letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressing dismay over Canada’s level of defence spending.
They pressed Trudeau to come to this summer’s NATO summit with a plan to fulfil Canada’s commitment to reach the alliance’s longstanding spending target.
The letter from 23 members of the U.S. Senate, from both parties, represents a dramatic and public escalation of pressure from Washington over a longstanding bilateral irritant.
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That written critique [letter] comes just days after Defence Minister Bill Blair completed what he referred to as a productive trip to Washington to promote Canada’s new military strategy.
“We are concerned and profoundly disappointed,” says the letter, referring to the spending levels in the strategy Blair came to promote.
A bipartisan pair of U.S. senators say they expect Canada and the U.S. to work collaboratively on shared issues of defence and the border, but suggested Ottawa’s policies on military spending need to change to speed up progress.
Speaking to Mercedes Stephenson from the Halifax International Security Forum in an interview that aired Sunday on The West Block, Republican Sen. James Risch of Idaho and Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire downplayed concerns that incoming president-elect Donald Trump will penalize Canada on things like trade if it doesn’t step up on defence spending.
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As far as I’m concerned, this budget offers some moderate gains from a science and technology perspective and with regard to military spending, it seems a little lacklustre overall and with regard to military research, that might be called nonexistent.
The October 2024 issue of The Advance (Council of Canadian Academies [CCA] newsletter) arrived in my emailbox on October 15, 2024 with some interesting tidbits about artificial intelligence, Note: For anyone who wants to see the entire newsletter for themselves, you can sign up here or in French, vous pouvez vous abonner ici,
Artificial Intelligence and Canada’s Science Diplomacy Future
For nearly two decades, Canada has been a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) research, contributing a significant percentage of the world’s top-cited scientific publications on the subject. In that time, the number of countries participating in international collaborations has grown significantly, supporting new partnerships and accounting for as much as one quarter of all published research articles.
“Opportunities for partnerships are growing rapidly alongside the increasing complexity of new scientific discoveries and emerging industry sectors,” wrote the CCA Expert Panel on International Science, Technology, Innovation and Knowledge Partnerships earlier this year, singling out Canada’s AI expertise. “At the same time, discussions of sovereignty and national interests abut the movement toward open science and transdisciplinary approaches.”
On Friday, November 22 [2024], the CCA will host “Strategy and Influence: AI and Canada’s Science Diplomacy Future” as part of the Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC) annual conference. The panel discussion will draw on case studies related to AI research collaboration to explore the ways in which such partnerships inform science diplomacy. Panellists include:
Monica Gattinger, chair of the CCA Expert Panel on International Science, Technology, Innovation and Knowledge Partnerships and director of the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa (picture omitted)
David Barnes, head of the British High Commission Science, Climate, and Energy Team
Constanza Conti, Professor of Numerical Analysis at the University of Florence and Scientific Attaché at the Italian Embassy in Ottawa
Jean-François Doulet, Attaché for Science and Higher Education at the Embassy of France in Canada
Konstantinos Kapsouropoulos, Digital and Research Counsellor at the Delegation of the European Union to Canada
For details on CSPC 2024, click here. [Here’s the theme and a few more details about the conference: Empowering Society: The Transformative Value of Science, Knowledge, and Innovation; The 16th annual Canadian Science Policy Conference (CSPC) will be held in person from November 20th to 22nd, 2024] For a user guide to Navigating Collaborative Futures, from the CCA’s Expert Panel on International Science, Technology, Innovation and Knowledge Partnerships, click here.
448: Strategy and Influence: AI and Canada’s Science Diplomacy Future
Friday, November 22 [2024] 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm EST
Science and International Affairs and Security
About
Organized By: Council of Canadian Academies (CCA)
Artificial intelligence has already begun to transform Canada’s economy and society, and the broader advantages of international collaboration in AI research have the potential to make an even greater impact. With three national AI institutes and a Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, Canada’s AI ecosystem is thriving and positions the country to build stronger international partnerships in this area, and to develop more meaningful international collaborations in other areas of innovation. This panel will convene science attachés to share perspectives on science diplomacy and partnerships, drawing on case studies related to AI research collaboration.
The newsletter also provides links to additional readings on various topics, here are the AI items,
In Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Emmanuel Macron of France renewed their commitment “to strengthening economic exchanges between Canadian and French AI ecosystems.” They also revealed that Canada would be named Country of the Year at Viva Technology’s annual conference, to be held next June in Paris.
A “slower, but more capable” version of OpenAI is impressing scientists with the strength of its responses to prompts, according to Nature. The new version, referred to as “o1,” outperformed a previous ChatGPT model on a standardized test involving chemistry, physics, and biology questions, and “beat PhD-level scholars on the hardest series of questions.” [Note: As of October 16, 2024, the Nature news article of October 1, 2024 appears to be open access. It’s unclear how long this will continue to be the case.]
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In memoriam: Abhishek Gupta, the founder and principal researcher of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute and a member of the CCA Expert Panel on Artificial Intelligence for Science and Engineering, died on September 30 [2024]. His colleagues shared the news in a memorial post, writing, “It was during his time in Montreal that Abhishek envisioned a future where ethics and AI would intertwine—a vision that became the driving force behind his life’s work.”
Meeting in Ottawa on September 26, 2024, Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, and Emmanuel Macron, the President of the French Republic, issued a call to action to promote the development of a responsible approach to artificial intelligence (AI).
Our two countries will increase the coordination of our actions, as Canada will assume the Presidency of the G7 in 2025 and France will host the AI Action Summit on February 10 and 11, 2025.
Our two countries are working on the development and use of safe, secure and trustworthy AI as part of a risk-aware, human-centred and innovation-friendly approach. This cooperation is based on shared values. We believe that the development and use of AI need to be beneficial for individuals and the planet, for example by increasing human capabilities and developing creativity, ensuring the inclusion of under-represented people, reducing economic, social, gender and other inequalities, protecting information integrity and protecting natural environments, which in turn will promote inclusive growth, well-being, sustainable development and environmental sustainability.
We are committed to promoting the development and use of AI systems that respect the rule of law, human rights, democratic values and human-centred values. Respecting these values means developing and using AI systems that are transparent and explainable, robust, safe and secure, and whose stakeholders are held accountable for respecting these principles, in line with the Recommendation of the OECD Council on Artificial Intelligence, the Hiroshima AI Process, the G20 AI Principles and the International Partnership for Information and Democracy.
Based on these values and principles, Canada and France are working on high-quality scientific cooperation. In April 2023, we formalized the creation of a joint committee for science, technology and innovation. This committee has identified emerging technologies, including AI, as one of the priorities areas for cooperation between our two countries. In this context, a call for AI research projects was announced last July, scheduled for the end of 2024 and funded, on the French side, by the French National Research Agency, and, on the Canadian side, by a consortium made up of Canada’s three granting councils (the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research) and IVADO [Institut de valorisation des données], the AI research, training and transfer consortium.
We will also collaborate on the evaluation and safety of AI models. We have announced key AI safety initiatives, including the AI Safety Institute of Canada [emphasis mine; not to be confused with Artificial Intelligence Governance & Safety Canada (AIGS)], which will be launched soon, and France’s National Centre for AI evaluation. We expect these two agencies will work to improve knowledge and understanding of technical and socio-technical aspects related to the safety and evaluation of advanced AI systems.
Canada and France are committed to strengthening economic exchanges between Canadian and French AI ecosystems, whether by organizing delegations, like the one organized by Scale AI with 60 Canadian companies at the latest Viva Technology conference in Paris, or showcasing France at the ALL IN event in Montréal on September 11 and 12, 2024, through cooperation between companies, for example, through large companies’ adoption of services provided by small companies or through the financial support that investment funds provide to companies on both sides of the Atlantic. Our two countries will continue their cooperation at the upcoming Viva Technology conference in Paris, where Canada will be the Country of the Year.
We want to strengthen our cooperation in terms of developing AI capabilities. We specifically want to promote access to AI’s compute capabilities in order to support national and international technological advances in research and business, notably in emerging markets and developing countries, while committing to strengthening their efforts to make the necessary improvements to the energy efficiency of these infrastructures. We are also committed to sharing their experience in initiatives to develop AI skills and training in order to accelerate workforce deployment.
Canada and France cooperate on the international stage to ensure the alignment and convergence of AI regulatory frameworks, given the economic potential and the global social consequences of this technological revolution. Under our successive G7 presidencies in 2018 and 2019, we worked to launch the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), which now has 29 members from all over the world, and whose first two centres of expertise were opened in Montréal and Paris. We support the creation of the new integrated partnership, which brings together OECD and GPAI member countries, and welcomes new members, including emerging and developing economies. We hope that the implementation of this new model will make it easier to participate in joint research projects that are of public interest, reduce the global digital divide and support constructive debate between the various partners on standards and the interoperability of their AI-related regulations.
We will continue our cooperation at the AI Action Summit in France on February 10 and 11, 2025, where we will strive to find solutions to meet our common objectives, such as the fight against disinformation or the reduction of the environmental impact of AI. With the objective of actively and tangibly promoting the use of the French language in the creation, production, distribution and dissemination of AI, taking into account its richness and diversity, and in compliance with copyright, we will attempt to identify solutions that are in line with the five themes of the summit: AI that serves the public interest, the future of work, innovation and culture, trust in AI and global AI governance.
Canada has accepted to co-chair the working group on global AI governance in order to continue the work already carried out by the GPAI, the OECD, the United Nations and its various bodies, the G7 and the G20. We would like to highlight and advance debates on the cultural challenges of AI in order to accelerate the joint development of relevant responses to the challenges faced. We would also like to develop the change management policies needed to support all of the affected cultural sectors. We will continue these discussions together during our successive G7 presidencies in 2025 and 2026.
I checked out the In memoriam notice for Abhishek Gupta and found this, Note: Links have been removed except the link to the Abhishek Gupta’s memorial page hosting tributes, stories, and more. The link is in the highlighted paragraph,
Honoring the Life and Legacy of a Leader in AI Ethics
In accordance with his family’s wishes, it is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Abhishek Gupta, Founder and Principal Researcher of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute (MAIEI), Director for Responsible AI at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and a pioneering voice in the field of AI ethics. Abhishek passed away peacefully in his sleep on September 30, 2024 in India, surrounded by his loving family. He is survived by his father, Ashok Kumar Gupta; his mother, Asha Gupta; and his younger brother, Abhijay Gupta.
Note: Details of a memorial service will be announced in the coming weeks. For those who wish to share stories, personal anecdotes, and photos of Abhishek, please visit www.forevermissed.com/abhishekgupta — your contributions will be greatly appreciated by his family and loved ones.
Born on December 20, 1992, in India, Abhishek’s intellectual curiosity and drive to understand technology led him on a remarkable journey. After excelling at Delhi Public School, Abhishek attended McGill University in Montreal, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (BSc’15). Following his graduation, Abhishek worked as a software engineer at Ericsson. He later joined Microsoft as a machine learning engineer, where he also served on the CSE Responsible AI Board. It was during his time in Montreal that Abhishek envisioned a future where ethics and AI would intertwine—a vision that became the driving force behind his life’s work.
The Beginnings: Building a Global AI Ethics Community
Abhishek’s vision for MAIEI was rooted in community building. He began hosting in-person AI Ethics Meetups in Montreal throughout 2017. These gatherings were unique—participants completed assigned readings in advance, split into small groups for discussion, and then reconvened to share insights. This approach fostered deep, structured conversations and made AI ethics accessible to everyone, regardless of their background. The conversations and insights from these meetups became the foundation of MAIEI, which was launched in May 2018.
When the pandemic hit, Abhishek adapted the meetup format to an online setting, enabling MAIEI to expand worldwide. It was his idea to bring these conversations to a global stage, using virtual platforms to ensure voices from all corners of the world could join in. He passionately stood up for the “little guy,” making sure that those whose voices might be overlooked or unheard in traditional forums had a platform. Under his stewardship, MAIEI emerged as a globally recognized leader in fostering public discussions on the ethical implications of artificial intelligence. Through MAIEI, Abhishek fulfilled his mission of democratizing AI ethics literacy, empowering individuals from all backgrounds to engage with the future of technology.
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I offer my sympathies to his family, friends, and communities for their profound loss.
The Canadian federal government released its 2023 budget on Tuesday, March 28, 2023. There were no flashy science research announcements in the budget. Trudeau and his team like to trumpet science initiatives and grand plans (even if they’re reannouncing something from a previous budget) but like last year—this year—not so much.
Consequently, this posting about the annual federal budget should have been shorter than usual. What happened?
Partly, it’s the military spending (chapter 5 of the budget in part 2 of this 2023 budget post). For those who are unfamiliar with the link between military scientific research and their impact on the general population, there are a number of inventions and innovations directly due to military research, e.g., plastic surgery, television, and the internet. (You can check a November 6, 2018 essay for The Conversation by Robert Kirby, Professor of Clinical Education and Surgery at Keele University, for more about the impact of World War 1 and medical research, “World War I: the birth of plastic surgery and modern anaesthesia.”)
So, there’s a lot to be found by inference. Consequently, I found Chapter 3 to also be unexpectedly rich in science and technology efforts.
Throughout both parts of this 2023 Canadian federal budget post, you will find excerpts from individual chapters of the federal budget followed my commentary directly after. My general commentary is reserved for the end.
Sometimes, I have included an item because it piqued my interest. E.g., Canadian agriculture is dependent on Russian fertilizer!!! News to me and I imagine many others. BTW, this budget aims to wean us from this dependency.
Chapter 2: Investing in Public Health Care and Affordable Dental Care
Improving Canada’s Readiness for Health Emergencies
Vaccines and other cutting-edge life-science innovations have helped us to take control of the COVID-19 pandemic. To support these efforts, the federal government has committed significant funding towards the revitalization of Canada’s biomanufacturing sector through a Biomanufacturing and Life Sciences Strategy [emphasis mine]. To date, the government has invested more than $1.8 billion in 32 vaccine, therapeutic, and biomanufacturing projects across Canada, alongside $127 million for upgrades to specialized labs at universities across the country. Canada is building a life sciences ecosystem that is attracting major investments from leading global companies, including Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Sanofi.
To build upon the progress of the past three years, the government will explore new ways to be more efficient and effective in the development and production of the vaccines, therapies, and diagnostic tools that would be required for future health emergencies. As a first step, the government will further consult Canadian and international experts on how to best organize our readiness efforts for years to come. …
Protecting the health and safety of Canadians and making sure we have the domestic capacity to respond to future health crises are top priorities of the Government of Canada. With the guidance of Canada’s Biomanufacturing and Life Sciences Strategy, the government is actively supporting the growth of a strong, competitive domestic life sciences sector, with cutting-edge biomanufacturing capabilities.
Today [March 3, 2022], the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, announced a $92 million investment in adMare BioInnovations to drive company innovation, scale-up and training activities in Canada’s life sciences sector. This investment will help translate commercially promising health research into innovative new therapies and will see Canadian anchor companies provide the training required and drive the growth of Canada’s life science companies.
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The real action took place earlier this month (March 2023) just prior to the budget. Oddly, I can’t find any mention of these initiatives in the budget document. (Confession: I have not given the 2023 budget a close reading although I have been through the whole budget once and viewed individual chapters more closely a few times.)
The Government of Canada’s main priority continues to be protecting the health and safety of Canadians. Throughout the pandemic, the quick and decisive actions taken by the government meant that Canada was able to scale up domestic biomanufacturing capacity, which had been in decline for over 40 years. Since then, the government is rebuilding a strong and competitive biomanufacturing and life sciences sector brick by brick. This includes strengthening the foundations of the life sciences ecosystem through the research and talent of Canada’s world-class postsecondary institutions and research hospitals, as well as fostering increased collaboration with innovative companies.
Today [March 2, 2023?], the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, and the Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Health, announced an investment of $10 million in support of the creation of five research hubs [emphasis mine]:
CBRF PRAIRIE Hub, led by the University of Alberta
Canada’s Immuno-Engineering and Biomanufacturing Hub, led by The University of British Columbia
Eastern Canada Pandemic Preparedness Hub, led by the Université de Montréal
Canadian Pandemic Preparedness Hub, led by the University of Ottawa and McMaster University
Canadian Hub for Health Intelligence & Innovation in Infectious Diseases, led by the University of Toronto
This investment, made through Stage 1 of the integrated Canada Biomedical Research Fund (CBRF) and Biosciences Research Infrastructure Fund (BRIF) competition, will bolster research and talent development efforts led by the institutions, working in collaboration with their partners. The hubs combine the strengths of academia, industry and the public and not-for-profit sectors to jointly improve pandemic readiness and the overall health and well-being of Canadians.
The multidisciplinary research hubs will accelerate the research and development of next-generation vaccines and therapeutics and diagnostics, while supporting training and development to expand the pipeline of skilled talent. The hubs will also accelerate the translation of promising research into commercially viable products and processes. This investment helps to strengthen the resilience of Canada’s life sciences sector by supporting leading Canadian research in innovative technologies that keep us safe and boost our economy.
Today’s [March 2, 2023?] announcement also launched Stage 2 of the CBRF-BRIF competition. This is a national competition that includes $570 million in available funding for proposals, aimed at cutting-edge research, talent development and research infrastructure projects associated with the selected research hubs. By strengthening research and talent capacity and leveraging collaborations across the entire biomanufacturing ecosystem, Canada will be better prepared to face future pandemics, in order to protect Canadian’s health and safety.
Since March 2020, major achievements have been made to rebuild a vibrant domestic life sciences ecosystem to protect Canadians against future health threats. The growth of the sector is a top priority for the Government of Canada, and with over $1.8 billion committed to 33 projects to boost our domestic biomanufacturing, vaccine and therapeutics capacity, we are strengthening our resiliency for current health emergencies and our readiness for future ones.
The COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force played a critical role in guiding and supporting the Government of Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine response. Today [March 9, 2023], recognizing the importance of science-based decisions, the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, and the Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Health, are pleased to announce the creation of the Council of Expert Advisors (CEA). The 14 members of the CEA, who held their first official meeting earlier this week, will advise the Government of Canada on the long-term, sustainable growth of Canada’s biomanufacturing and life sciences sector, and on how to enhance our preparedness and capacity to protect the health and safety of Canadians.
The membership of the CEA comprises leaders with in-depth scientific, industrial, academic and public health expertise. The CEA co-chairs are Joanne Langley, Professor of Pediatrics and of Community Health and Epidemiology at the Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine, and Division Head of Infectious Diseases at the IWK Health Centre; and Marco Marra, Professor in Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia (UBC), UBC Canada Research Chair in Genome Science and distinguished scientist at the BC Cancer Foundation.
The CEA’s first meeting focused on the previous steps taken under Canada’s Biomanufacturing and Life Sciences Strategy and on its path forward. The creation of the CEA is an important milestone in the strategy, as it continues to evolve and adapt to new technologies and changing conditions in the marketplace and life sciences ecosystem. The CEA will also inform on investments that enhance capacity across Canada to support end-to-end production of critical vaccines, therapeutics and essential medical countermeasures, and to ensure that Canadians can reap the full economic benefits of the innovations developed, including well-paying jobs.
Canada’s biotech ecosystem is poised for a major boost with the federal government announcement today that B.C. will be home to Canada’s Immuno-Engineering and Biomanufacturing Hub (CIEBH).
The B.C.-based research and innovation hub, led by UBC, brings together a coalition of provincial, national and international partners to position Canada as a global epicentre for the development and manufacturing of next-generation immune-based therapeutics.
A primary goal of CIEBH is to establish a seamless drug development pipeline that will enable Canada to respond to future pandemics and other health challenges in fewer than 100 days.
This hub will build on the strengths of B.C.’s biotech and life sciences industry, and those of our national and global partners, to make Canada a world leader in the development of lifesaving medicines,” said Dr. Deborah Buszard, interim president and vice-chancellor of UBC. “It’s about creating a healthier future for all Canadians. Together with our outstanding alliance of partners, we will ensure Canada is prepared to respond rapidly to future health challenges with homegrown solutions.”
CIEBH is one of five new research hubs announced by the federal government that will work together to improve pandemic readiness and the overall health and well-being of Canadians. Federal funding of $570 million is available over the next four years to support project proposals associated with these hubs in order to advance Canada’s Biomanufacturing and Life Sciences Strategy.
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More than 50 organizations representing the private, public, not-for-profit and academic sectors have come together to form the hub, creating a rich environment that will bolster biomedical innovation in Canada. Among these partners are leading B.C. biotech companies that played a key role in Canada’s COVID-19 pandemic response and are developing cutting-edge treatments for a range of human diseases.
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CIEBH, led by UBC, will further align the critical mass of biomedical research strengths concentrated at B.C. academic institutions, including the B.C. Institute of Technology, Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria, as well as the clinical expertise of B.C. research hospitals and health authorities. With linkages to key partners across Canada, including Dalhousie University, the University of Waterloo, and the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, the hub will create a national network to address gaps in Canada’s drug development pipeline.
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In recent decades, B.C. has emerged as a global leader in immuno-engineering, a field that is transforming how society treats disease by harnessing and modulating the immune system.
B.C. academic institutions and prominent Canadian companies like Precision NanoSystems, Acuitas Therapeutics and AbCellera have developed significant expertise in advanced immune-based therapeutics such as lipid nanoparticle- and mRNA-based vaccines, engineered antibodies, cell therapies and treatments for antimicrobial resistant infections. UBC professor Dr. Pieter Cullis, a member of CIEBH’s core scientific team, has been widely recognized for his pioneering work developing the lipid nanoparticle delivery technology that enables mRNA therapeutics such as the highly effective COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
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As noted previously, I’m a little puzzled that the federal government didn’t mention the investment in these hubs in their budget. They usually trumpet these kinds of initiatives.
On a related track, I’m even more puzzled that the province of British Columbia does not have its own life sciences research strategy in light of that sector’s success. Certainly it seems that Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward are all eager to get a piece of the action. Still, there is a Life Sciences in British Columbia: Sector Profile dated June 2020 and an undated (likely from some time between July 2017 to January 2020 when Bruce Ralston whose name is on the document was the relevant cabinet minister) British Columbia Technology and Innovation Policy Framework.
More than US$100 trillion in private capital is projected to be spent between now and 2050 to build the global clean economy.
Canada is currently competing with the United States, the European Union, and countries around the world for our share of this investment. To secure our share of this global investment, we must capitalize on Canada’s competitive advantages, including our skilled and diverse workforce, and our abundance of critical resources that the world needs.
The federal government has taken significant action over the past seven years to support Canada’s net-zero economic future. To build on this progress and support the growth of Canada’s clean economy, Budget 2023 proposes a range of measures that will encourage businesses to invest in Canada and create good-paying jobs for Canadian workers.
This made-in-Canada plan follows the federal tiered structure to incent the development of Canada’s clean economy and provide additional support for projects that need it. This plan includes:
Clear and predictable investment tax credits to provide foundational support for clean technology manufacturing, clean hydrogen, zero-emission technologies, and carbon capture and storage;
The deployment of financial instruments through the Canada Growth Fund, such as contracts for difference, to absorb certain risks and encourage private sector investment in low-carbon projects, technologies, businesses, and supply chains; and,
Targeted clean technology and sector supports delivered by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada to support battery manufacturing and further advance the development, application, and manufacturing of clean technologies.
Canada’s Potential in Critical Minerals
As a global leader in mining, Canada is in a prime position to provide a stable resource base for critical minerals [emphasis mine] that are central to major global industries such as clean technology, auto manufacturing, health care, aerospace, and the digital economy. For nickel and copper alone, the known reserves in Canada are more than 10 million tonnes, with many other potential sources at the exploration stage.
The Buy North American provisions for critical minerals and electric vehicles in the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act will create opportunities for Canada. In particular, U.S. acceleration of clean technology manufacturing will require robust supply chains of critical minerals that Canada has in abundance. However, to fully unleash Canada’s potential in critical minerals, we need to ensure a framework is in place to accelerate private investment.
Budget 2022 committed $3.8 billion for Canada’s Critical Minerals Strategy to provide foundational support to Canada’s mining sector to take advantage of these new opportunities. The Strategy was published in December 2022.
On March 24, 2023, the government launched the Critical Minerals Infrastructure Fund [emphasis mine; I cannot find a government announcement/news release for this fund]—a new fund announced in Budget 2022 that will allocate $1.5 billion towards energy and transportation projects needed to unlock priority mineral deposits. The new fund will complement other clean energy and transportation supports, such as the Canada Infrastructure Bank and the National Trade Corridors Fund, as well as other federal programs that invest in critical minerals projects, such as the Strategic Innovation Fund.
The new Investment Tax Credit for Clean Technology Manufacturing proposed in Budget 2023 will also provide a significant incentive to boost private investment in Canadian critical minerals projects and create new opportunities and middle class jobs in communities across the country.
An Investment Tax Credit for Clean Technology Manufacturing
Supporting Canadian companies in the manufacturing and processing of clean technologies, and in the extraction and processing of critical minerals, will create good middle class jobs for Canadians, ensure our businesses remain competitive in major global industries, and support the supply chains of our allies around the world.
While the Clean Technology Investment Tax Credit, first announced in Budget 2022, will provide support to Canadian companies adopting clean technologies, the Clean Technology Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit will provide support to Canadian companies that are manufacturing or processing clean technologies and their precursors.
Budget 2023 proposes a refundable tax credit equal to 30 per cent of the cost of investments in new machinery and equipment used to manufacture or process key clean technologies, and extract, process, or recycle key critical minerals, including:
Extraction, processing, or recycling of critical minerals essential for clean technology supply chains, specifically: lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, copper, and rare earth elements;
Manufacturing of renewable or nuclear energy equipment;
Processing or recycling of nuclear fuels and heavy water; [emphases mine]
Manufacturing of grid-scale electrical energy storage equipment;
Manufacturing of zero-emission vehicles; and,
Manufacturing or processing of certain upstream components and materials for the above activities, such as cathode materials and batteries used in electric vehicles.
The investment tax credit is expected to cost $4.5 billion over five years, starting in 2023-24, and an additional $6.6 billion from 2028-29 to 2034-35. The credit would apply to property that is acquired and becomes available for use on or after January 1, 2024, and would no longer be in effect after 2034, subject to a phase-out starting in 2032.
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3.4 Reliable Transportation and Resilient Infrastructure
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Supporting Resilient Infrastructure Through Innovation
The Smart Cities Challenge [emphasis mine] was launched in 2017 to encourage cities to adopt new and innovative approaches to improve the quality of life for their residents. The first round of the Challenge resulted in $75 million in prizes across four winning applicants: Montreal, Quebec; Guelph, Ontario; communities of Nunavut; and Bridgewater, Nova Scotia.
New and innovative solutions are required to help communities reduce the risks and impacts posed by weather-related events and disasters triggered by climate change. To help address this issue, the government will be launching a new round of the Smart Cities Challenge later this year, which will focus on using connected technologies, data, and innovative approaches to improve climate resiliency.
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3.5 Investing in Tomorrow’s Technology
With the best-educated workforce on earth, world-class academic and research institutions, and robust start-up ecosystems across the country, Canada’s economy is fast becoming a global technology leader – building on its strengths in areas like artificial intelligence. Canada is already home to some of the top markets for high-tech careers in North America, including the three fastest growing markets between 2016 and 2021: Vancouver, Toronto, and Quebec City.
However, more can be done to help the Canadian economy reach its full potential. Reversing a longstanding trend of underinvestment in research and development by Canadian business [emphasis mine] is essential our long-term economic growth.
Budget 2023 proposes new measures to encourage business innovation in Canada, as well as new investments in college research and the forestry industry that will help to build a stronger and more innovative Canadian economy.
Attracting High-Tech Investment to Canada
In recent months, Canada has attracted several new digital and high-tech projects that will support our innovative economy, including:
Nokia: a $340 million project that will strengthen Canada’s position as a leader in 5G and digital innovation;
Xanadu Quantum Technologies: a $178 million project that will support Canada’s leadership in quantum computing;
Sanctuary Cognitive Systems Corporation: a $121 million project that will boost Canada’s leadership in the global Artificial Intelligence market; and,
EXFO: a $77 million project to create a 5G Centre of Excellence that aims to develop one of the world’s first Artificial Intelligence-based automated network solutions.
Review of the Scientific Research and Experimental Development Tax Incentive Program
The Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax incentive program continues to be a cornerstone of Canada’s innovation strategy by supporting research and development with the goal of encouraging Canadian businesses of all sizes to invest in innovation that drives economic growth.
In Budget 2022, the federal government announced its intention to review the SR&ED program to ensure it is providing adequate support and improving the development, retention, and commercialization of intellectual property, including the consideration of adopting a patent box regime. [emphasis mine] The Department of Finance will continue to engage with stakeholders on the next steps in the coming months.
Modernizing Canada’s Research Ecosystem
Canada’s research community and world-class researchers solve some of the world’s toughest problems, and Canada’s spending on higher education research and development, as a share of GDP, has exceeded all other G7 countries.
Since 2016, the federal government has committed more than $16 billion of additional funding to support research and science across Canada. This includes:
Nearly $4 billion in Budget 2018 for Canada’s research system, including $2.4 billion for the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the granting councils—the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; [emphases mine]
More than $500 million in Budget 2019 in total additional support to third-party research and science organizations, in addition to the creation of the Strategic Science Fund, which will announce successful recipients later this year;
$1.2 billion in Budget 2021 for Pan-Canadian Genomics and Artificial Intelligence Strategies, and a National Quantum Strategy;
$1 billion in Budget 2021 to the granting councils and the Canada Foundation for Innovation for life sciences researchers and infrastructure; and,
The January 2023 announcement of Canada’s intention to become a full member in the Square Kilometre Array Observatory, which will provide Canadian astronomers with access to its ground-breaking data. The government is providing up to $269.3 million to support this collaboration.
In order to maintain Canada’s research strength—and the knowledge, innovations, and talent it fosters—our systems to support science and research must evolve. The government has been consulting with stakeholders, including through the independent Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System, to seek advice from research leaders on how to further strengthen Canada’s research support system.
The government is carefully considering the Advisory Panel’s advice, with more detail to follow in the coming months on further efforts to modernize the system.
Using College Research to Help Businesses Grow
Canada’s colleges, CEGEPs, and polytechnic institutes use their facilities, equipment, and expertise to solve applied research problems every day. Students at these institutions are developing the skills they need to start good careers when they leave school, and by partnering with these institutions, businesses can access the talent and the tools they need to innovate and grow.
To help more Canadian businesses access the expertise and research and development facilities they need, Budget 2023 proposes to provide $108.6 million over three years, starting in 2023-24, to expand the College and Community Innovation Program, administered by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.
Supporting Canadian Leadership in Space
For decades, Canada’s participation in the International Space Station has helped to fuel important scientific advances, and showcased Canada’s ability to create leading-edge space technologies, such as Canadarm2. Canadian space technologies have inspired advances in other fields, such as the NeuroArm, the world’s first robot capable of operating inside an MRI, making previously impossible surgeries possible.
Budget 2023 proposes to provide $1.1 billion [emphasis mine] over 14 years, starting in 2023-24, on a cash basis, to the Canadian Space Agency [emphasis mine] to continue Canada’s participation in the International Space Station until 2030.
Looking forward, humanity is returning to the moon [emphasis mine]. Canada intends to join these efforts by contributing a robotic lunar utility vehicle to perform key activities in support of human lunar exploration. Canadian participation in the NASA-led Lunar Gateway station—a space station that will orbit the moon—also presents new opportunities for innovative advances in science and technology. Canada is providing Canadarm3 to the Lunar Gateway, and a Canadian astronaut will join Artemis II, the first crewed mission to the moon since 1972. In Budget 2023, the government is providing further support to assist these missions.
Budget 2023 proposes to provide $1.2 billion [emphasis mine] over 13 years, starting in 2024-25, to the Canadian Space Agency to develop and contribute a lunar utility vehicle to assist astronauts on the moon.
Budget 2023 proposes to provide $150 million [emphasis mine[ over five years, starting in 2023-24, to the Canadian Space Agency for the next phase of the Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program to support the Canada’s world-class space industry and help accelerate the development of new technologies.
Budget 2023 also proposes to provide $76.5 million [emphasis mine] over eight years, starting in 2023-24, on a cash basis, to the Canadian Space Agency in support of Canadian science on the Lunar Gateway station.
Investing in Canada’s Forest Economy
The forestry sector plays an important role in Canada’s natural resource economy [emphasis mine], and is a source of good careers in many rural communities across Canada, including Indigenous communities. As global demand for sustainable forest products grows, continued support for Canada’s forestry sector will help it innovate, grow, and support good middle class jobs for Canadians.
Budget 2023 proposes to provide $368.4 million over three years, starting in 2023-24, with $3.1 million in remaining amortization, to Natural Resources Canada to renew and update forest sector support, including for research and development, Indigenous and international leadership, and data. Of this amount, $30.1 million would be sourced from existing departmental resources.
Establishing the Dairy Innovation and Investment Fund
The dairy sector is facing a growing surplus of solids non-fat (SNF) [emphasis mine], a by-product of dairy processing. Limited processing capacity for SNF results in lost opportunities for dairy processors and farmers.
Budget 2023 proposes to provide $333 million over ten years, starting in 2023-24, for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to support investments in research and development of new products based on SNF, market development for these products, and processing capacity for SNF-based products more broadly.
Supporting Farmers for Diversifying Away from Russian Fertilizers
Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has resulted in higher prices for nitrogen fertilizers, which has had a notable impact on Eastern Canadian farmers who rely heavily on imported fertilizer.
Budget 2023 proposes to provide $34.1 million over three years, starting in 2023-24, to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s On-Farm Climate Action Fund to support adoption of nitrogen management practices by Eastern Canadian farmers, that will help optimize the use and reduce the need for fertilizer.
Providing Interest Relief for Agricultural Producers
Farm production costs have increased in Canada and around the world, including as a result Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and global supply chain disruptions. It is important that Canada’s agricultural producers have access to the cash flow they need to cover these costs until they sell their products.
Budget 2023 proposes to provide $13 million in 2023-24 to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to increase the interest-free limit for loans under the Advance Payments Program from $250,000 to $350,000 for the 2023 program year.
Additionally, the government will consult with provincial and territorial counterparts to explore ways to extend help to small agricultural producers who demonstrate urgent financial need.
Maintaining Livestock Sector Exports with a Foot-and-Mouth Disease Vaccine Bank
Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) is a highly transmissible illness that can affect cattle, pigs, and other cloven-hoofed animals. Recent outbreaks in Asia and Africa have increased the risk of global spread, and a FMD outbreak in Canada would cut off exports for all livestock sectors, with major economic implications. However, the impact of a potential outbreak would be significantly reduced with the early vaccination of livestock.
Budget 2023 proposes to provide $57.5 million over five years, starting in 2023-24, with $5.6 million ongoing, to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to establish a FMD vaccine bank for Canada, and to develop FMD response plans. The government will seek a cost-sharing arrangement with provinces and territories.
Canadian economic theory (the staples theory), mining, nuclear energy, quantum science, and more
Critical minerals are getting a lot of attention these days. (They were featured in the 2022 budget, see my April 19, 2022 posting, scroll down to the Mining subhead.) This year, US President Joe Biden, in his first visit to Canada as President, singled out critical minerals at the end of his 28 hour state visit (from a March 24, 2023 CBC news online article by Alexander Panetta; Note: Links have been removed),
There was a pot of gold at the end of President Joe Biden’s jaunt to Canada. It’s going to Canada’s mining sector.
The U.S. military will deliver funds this spring to critical minerals projects in both the U.S. and Canada. The goal is to accelerate the development of a critical minerals industry on this continent.
The context is the United States’ intensifying rivalry with China.
The U.S. is desperate to reduce its reliance on its adversary for materials needed to power electric vehicles, electronics and many other products, and has set aside hundreds of millions of dollars under a program called the Defence Production Act.
The Pentagon already has told Canadian companies they would be eligible to apply. It has said the cash would arrive as grants, not loans.
On Friday [March 24, 2023], before Biden left Ottawa, he promised they’ll get some.
The White House and the Prime Minister’s Office announced that companies from both countries will be eligible this spring for money from a $250 million US fund.
Which Canadian companies? The leaders didn’t say. Canadian officials have provided the U.S. with a list of at least 70 projects that could warrant U.S. funding.
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“Our nations are blessed with incredible natural resources,” Biden told Canadian parliamentarians during his speech in the House of Commons.
“Canada in particular has large quantities of critical minerals [emphasis mine] that are essential for our clean energy future, for the world’s clean energy future.
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I don’t believe that Joe Biden has ever heard of the Canadian academic Harold Innis (neither have most Canadians) but Biden is echoing a rather well known theory, in some circles, about Canada’s economy (from the Harold Innis Wikipedia entry),
Harold Adams Innis FRSC (November 5, 1894 – November 9, 1952) was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory, and Canadian economic history. He helped develop the staples thesis, which holds that Canada’s culture, political history, and economy have been decisively influenced by the exploitation and export of a series of “staples” such as fur, fish, lumber, wheat, mined metals, and coal. The staple thesis dominated economic history in Canada from the 1930s to 1960s, and continues to be a fundamental part of the Canadian political economic tradition.[8] [all emphases mine]
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The staples theory is referred to informally as “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
Simply put, our future depends on critical minerals. The Government of Canada is committed to investing in this future, which is why the Canadian Critical Minerals Strategy — launched by the Honourable Jonathan Wilkinson, Minister of Natural Resources, in December 2022 — is backed by up to $3.8 billion in federal funding. [emphases mine] Today [March 7, 2023], Minister Wilkinson announced more details on the implementation of this Strategy. Over $344 million in funding is supporting the following five new programs and initiatives:
Critical Minerals Technology and Innovation Program – $144.4 million for the research, development, demonstration, commercialization and adoption of new technologies and processes that support sustainable growth in Canadian critical minerals value chains and associated innovation ecosystems.
Critical Minerals Geoscience and Data Initiative – $79.2 million to enhance the quality and availability of data and digital technologies to support geoscience and mapping that will accelerate the efficient and effective development of Canadian critical minerals value chains, including by identifying critical minerals reserves and developing pathways for sustainable mineral development.
Global Partnerships Program – $70 million to strengthen Canada’s global leadership role in enhancing critical minerals supply chain resiliency through international collaborations related to critical minerals.
Northern Regulatory Initiative – $40 million to advance Canada’s northern and territorial critical minerals agenda by supporting regulatory dialogue, regional studies, land-use planning, impact assessments and Indigenous consultation.
Renewal of the Critical Minerals Centre of Excellence (CMCE) – $10.6 million so the CMCE can continue the ongoing development and implementation of the Canadian Critical Minerals Strategy.
Commentary from the mining community
Mariaan Webb wrote a March 29,2023 article about the budget and the response from the mining community for miningweekly.com, Note: Links have been removed,
The 2023 Budget, delivered by Finance Minister ChrystiaFreeland on Tuesday, bolsters the ability of the Canadian mining sector to deliver for the country, recognising the industry’s central role in enabling the transition to a net-zero economy, says Mining Association of Canada (MAC) president and CEO PierreGratton.
“Without mining, there are no electric vehicles, no clean power from wind farms, solar panels or nuclear energy, [emphasis mine] and no transmission lines,” said Gratton.
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What kind of nuclear energy?
There are two kinds of nuclear energy: fission and fusion. (Fission is the one where the atom is split and requires minerals. Fusion energy is how stars are formed. Much less polluting than fission energy, at this time it is not a commercially viable option nor is it close to being so.)
As far as I’m aware, fusion energy does not require any mined materials. So, Gratton appears to be referring to fission nuclear energy when he’s talking about the mining sector and critical minerals.
I have an October 28, 2022 posting, which provides an overview of fusion energy and the various projects designed to capitalize on it.
Smart Cities in Canada
I was happy to be updated on the Smart Cities Challenge. When I last wrote about it (a March 20, 2018 posting; scroll down to the “Smart Cities, the rest of the country, and Vancouver” subhead). I notice that the successful applicants are from Montreal, Quebec; Guelph, Ontario; communities of Nunavut; and Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. It’s about time northern communities got some attention. It’s hard not to notice that central Canada (i.e., Ontario and Quebec) again dominates.
I look forward to hearing more about the new, upcoming challenge.
The quantum crew
I first made note of what appears to be a fracture in the Canadian quantum community in a May 4, 2021 posting (scroll down to the National Quantum Strategy subhead) about the 2021 budget. I made note of it again in a July 26, 2022 posting (scroll down to the Canadian quantum scene subhead).
In my excerpts from the 3.5 Investing in Tomorrow’s Technology section of the 2023 budget, Xanadu Quantum Technologies, headquartered in Toronto, Ontario is singled out with three other companies (none of which are in the quantum computing field). Oddly, D-Wave Systems (located in British Columbia), which as far as I’m aware is the star of Canada’s quantum computing sector, has yet to be singled out in any budget I’ve seen yet. (I’m estimating I’ve reviewed about 10 budgets.)
Canadians in space
Shortly after the 2023 budget was presented, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen was revealed as one of four astronauts to go on a mission to orbit the moon. From a Canadian Broadcasting (CBC) April 3, 2023 news online article by Nicole Mortillaro (Note: A link has been removed),
Jeremy Hansen is heading to the moon.
The 47-year old Canadian astronaut was announced today as one of four astronauts — along with Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman — who will be part of NASA’s [US National Aeronautics and Space Administration] Artemis II mission.
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Hansen was one of four active Canadian astronauts that included Jennifer Sidey-Gibbons, Joshua Kutryk and David Saint-Jacques vying for a seat on the Orion spacecraft set to orbit the moon.
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Artemis II is the second step in NASA’s mission to return astronauts to the surface of the moon.
The astronauts won’t be landing, but rather they will orbit for 10 days in the Orion spacecraft, testing key components to prepare for Artemis III that will place humans back on the moon some time in 2025 for the first time since 1972.
Canada gets a seat on Artemis II due to its contributions to Lunar Gateway, a space station that will orbit the moon. But Canada is also building a lunar rover provided by Canadensys Aerospace.
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On Monday [April 3, 2023], Hansen noted there are two reasons a Canadian is going to the moon, adding that it “makes me smile when I say that.”
The first, he said, is American leadership, and the decision to curate an international team.
“The second reason is Canada’s can-do attitude,” he said proudly.
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In addition to our ‘can-do attitude,” we’re also spending some big money, i.e., the Canadian government has proposed in its 2023 budget some $2.5B to various space and lunar efforts over the next several years.
Chapter 3 odds and sods
First seen in the 2022 budget, the patent box regime makes a second appearance in the 2023 budget where apparently ‘stakeholders will be engaged’ later this year. At least, they’re not rushing into this. (For the original announcement and an explanation of a patent box regime, see my April 19, 2022 budget review; scroll down to the Review of Tax Support to R&D and Intellectual Property subhead.)
I’m happy to see the Dairy Innovation and Investment Fund. I’m particularly happy to see a focus on finding uses for solids non-fat (SNF) by providing “$333 million over ten years, starting in 2023-24, … research and development of new products based on SNF [emphasis mine], market development for these products, and processing capacity for SNF-based products more broadly.”
This investment contrasts with the approach to cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) derived from wood (i.e., the forest economy), where the Canadian government invested heavily in research and even opened a production facility under the auspices of a company, CelluForce. It was a little problematic.
By 2013, the facility had a stockpile of CNC and nowhere to sell it. That’s right, no market for CNC as there had been no product development. (See my May 8, 2012 posting where that lack is mentioned, specifically there’s a quote from Tim Harper in an excerpted Globe and Mail article. My August 17, 2016 posting notes that the stockpile was diminishing. The CelluForce website makes no mention of it now in 2023.)
It’s good to see the government emphasis on research into developing products for SNFs especially after the CelluForce stockpile and in light of US President Joe Biden’s recent enthusiasm over our critical minerals.
Chapter 4: Advancing Reconciliation and Building a Canada That Works for Everyone
Montreal recently hosted the Fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which led to a new Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. During COP15, Canada announced new funding for biodiversity and conservation measures at home and abroad that will support the implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework, including $800 million to support Indigenous-led conservation within Canada through the innovative Project Finance for Permanence model.
Protecting Our Freshwater
Canada is home to 20 per cent of the world’s freshwater supply. Healthy lakes and rivers are essential to Canadians, communities, and businesses across the country. Recognizing the threat to freshwater caused by climate change and pollution, the federal government is moving forward to establish a new Canada Water Agency and make major investments in a strengthened Freshwater Action Plan.
Budget 2023 proposes to provide $650 million over ten years, starting in 2023-24, to support monitoring, assessment, and restoration work in the Great Lakes, Lake Winnipeg, Lake of the Woods, St. Lawrence River, Fraser River, Saint John River, Mackenzie River, and Lake Simcoe. Budget 2023 also proposes to provide $22.6 million over three years, starting in 2023-24, to support better coordination of efforts to protect freshwater across Canada.
Budget 2023 also proposes to provide $85.1 million over five years, starting in 2023-24, with $0.4 million in remaining amortization and $21 million ongoing thereafter to support the creation of the Canada Water Agency [emphasis mine], which will be headquartered in Winnipeg. By the end of 2023, the government will introduce legislation that will fully establish the Canada Water Agency as a standalone entity.
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Cleaner and Healthier Ports
Canada’s ports are at the heart of our supply chains, delivering goods to Canadians and allowing our businesses to reach global markets. As rising shipping levels enable and create economic growth and good jobs, the federal government is taking action to protect Canada’s coastal ecosystems and communities.
Budget 2023 proposes to provide $165.4 million over seven years, starting in 2023-24, to Transport Canada to establish a Green Shipping Corridor Program to reduce the impact of marine shipping on surrounding communities and ecosystems. The program will help spur the launch of the next generation of clean ships, invest in shore power technology, and prioritize low-emission and low-noise vessels at ports.
Water, water everywhere
I wasn’t expecting to find mention of establishing a Canada Water Agency and details are sketchy other than, It will be in Winnipeg, Manitoba and there will be government funding. Fingers crossed that this agency will do some good work (whatever that might be). Personally, I’d like to see some action with regard to droughts.
In British Columbia (BC) where I live and which most of us think of as ‘water rich’, is suffering under conditions such that our rivers and lakes are at very low levels according to an April 6, 2023 article by Glenda Luymes for the Vancouver Sun (print version, p. A4),
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On the North American WaterWatch map, which codes river flows using a series of coloured dots, high flows are represented in various shades of blue while low flows are represented in red hues. On Wednesday [April 5, 2023], most of BC was speckled red, brown and orange, with the majority of the province’s rivers flowing “much below normal.”
“It does not bode well for the fish populations,” said Marvin Rosenau, a fisheries and ecosystems instructor at BCIT [British Columbia Institute of Technology]. …
Rosenau said low water last fall [2022], when much of BC was in the grip of drought, decreased salmon habitat during spawning season. …
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BC has already seen small early season wildfires, including one near Merritt last weekend [April 1/2, 2023]. …
The 2023 federal budget calls for a new national water agency to be based in Winnipeg, provided Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government remains in power long enough to see it established [emphasis mine] in the Manitoba capital.
The budget announced on Tuesday [March 28, 2023] calls for the creation of the Canada Water Agency, a new federal entity with a headquarters in Winnipeg.
While the federal government is still determining precisely what the new agency will do, one Winnipeg-based environmental organization expects it to become a one-stop shop for water science, water quality assessment and water management [emphasis mine].
“This is something that we don’t actually have in this country at the moment,” said Matt McCandless, a vice-president for the non-profit International Institute for Sustainable Development.
Right now, municipalities, provinces and Indigenous authorities take different approaches to managing water quality, water science, flooding and droughts, said McCandless, adding a national water agency could provide more co-ordination.
…
For now, it’s unknown how many employees will be based at the Canada Water Agency’s Winnipeg headquarters. According to the budget, legislation to create the agency won’t be introduced until later this year [emphasis mine].
That means the Winnipeg headquarters likely won’t materialize before 2024, one year before the Trudeau minority government faces re-election, assuming it doesn’t lose the confidence of the House of Commons beforehand [emphasis mine].
Nonetheless, several Canadian cities and provinces were vying for the Canada Water Agency’s headquarters, including Manitoba.
…
The budget also calls for $65 million worth of annual spending on lake science and restoration, with an unstated fraction of that cash devoted to Lake Winnipeg.
McCandless calls the spending on water science an improvement over previous budgets.
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Kives seems a tad jaundiced but you get that way (confession: I have too) when covering government spending promises.
Part 2 (military spending and general comments) will be posted sometime during the week of April 24-28, 2023.
Government of Canada launches Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System
Members to recommend enhancements to system to position Canadian researchers for success
October 6, 2022 – Ottawa, Ontario
Canada’s success is in large part due to our world-class researchers and their teams who are globally recognized for unleashing bold new ideas, driving technological breakthroughs and addressing complex societal challenges. The Government of Canada recognizes that for Canada to achieve its full potential, support for science and research must evolve as Canadians push beyond what is currently imaginable and continue to find Canadian-made solutions to the world’s toughest problems.
Today [October 6, 2022], the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, and the Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Health, launched the Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System. Benefiting from the insights of leaders in the science, research and innovation ecosystem, the panel will provide independent, expert policy advice on the structure, governance and management of the federal system supporting research and talent. This will ensure that Canadian researchers are positioned for even more success now and in the future.
As the COVID-19 pandemic and climate crisis have shown, addressing the world’s most pressing challenges requires greater collaboration within the Canadian research community, government and industry, as well as with the international community. A cohesive and agile research support system will ensure Canadian researchers can quickly and effectively respond to the questions of today and tomorrow. Optimizing Canada’s research support system will equip researchers to transcend disciplines and borders, seize new opportunities and be responsive to emerging needs and interests to improve Canadians’ health, well-being and prosperity.
Quotes
“Canada is known for world-class research thanks to the enormous capabilities of our researchers. Canadian researchers transform curiosity into bold new ideas that can significantly enhance Canadians’ lives and well-being. With this advisory panel, our government will ensure our support for their research is just as cutting-edge as Canada’s science and research community.” – The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry
“Our priority is to support Canada’s world-class scientific community so it can respond effectively to the challenges of today and the future. That’s why we are leveraging the expertise and perspectives of a newly formed advisory panel to maximize the impact of research and downstream innovation, which contributes significantly to Canadians’ well-being and prosperity.” – The Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Health
Quick facts
The Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System has seven members, including the Chair. The members were selected by the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry and the Minister of Health. The panel will consult with experts and stakeholders to draw on their diverse experiences, expertise and opinions.
Since 2016, the Government of Canada has committed more than $14 billion to support research and science across Canada.
Here’s a list of advisory panel members I’ve assembled from the Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System: Member biographies webpage,
Frédéric Bouchard (Chair) is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the Université de Montréal, where he has been a professor of philosophy of science since 2005.
Janet Rossant is a Senior Scientist Emeritus in the Developmental and Stem Cell Biology Program, the Hospital for Sick Children and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto’s Department of Molecular Genetics.
[Gilles Patry] is Professor Emeritus and President Emeritus at the University of Ottawa. Following a distinguished career as a consulting engineer, researcher and university administrator, Gilles Patry is now a consultant and board director [Royal Canadian Mint].
Yolande E. Chan joined McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management as Dean and James McGill Professor in 2021. Her research focuses on innovation, knowledge strategy, digital strategy, digital entrepreneurship, and business-IT alignment.
Laurel Schafer is a Professor at the Department of Chemistry at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on developing novel organometallic catalysts to carry out difficult transformations in small molecule organic chemistry.
Vianne Timmons is the President and Vice-Chancellor of Memorial University of Newfoundland since 2020. She is a nationally and internationally recognized researcher and advocate in the field of inclusive education.
Dr. Baljit Singh is a highly accomplished researcher, … . He began his role as Vice-President Research at the University of Saskatchewan in 2021, after serving as Dean of the University of Calgary Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (2016 – 2020), and as Associate Dean of Research at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan (2010 – 2016).
Nobody from the North. Nobody who’s worked there or lived there or researched there. It’s not the first time I’ve noticed a lack of representation for the North.
Canada’s golden triangle (Montréal, Toronto, Ottawa) is well represented and, as is often the case, there’s representation for other regions: one member from the Prairies, one member from the Maritimes or Atlantic provinces, and one member from the West.
The mandate indicates they could have five to eight members. With seven spots filled, they could include one more member, one from the North.
Even if they don’t add an eighth member, I’m not ready to abandon all hope for involvement from the North when there’s this, from the mandate,
Communications and deliverables
In pursuing its mandate, and to strengthen its advice, the panel may engage with experts and stakeholders to expand access [emphasis mine] to diverse experience, expertise and opinion, and enhance members’ understanding of the topics at hand.
To allow for frank and open discussion, internal panel deliberations among members will be closed.
The panel will deliver a final confidential report by December 2022 [emphasis mine] to the Ministers including recommendations and considerations regarding the modernization of the research support system. A summary of the panel’s observations on the state of the federal research support system may be made public once its deliberations have concluded. The Ministers may also choose to seek confidential advice and/or feedback from the panel on other issues related to the research system.
The panel may also be asked to deliver an interim confidential report to the Ministers by November 2022 [emphases mine], which will provide the panel’s preliminary observations up to that point.
it seems odd there’s no mention of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy. It’s my understanding that the funding goes directly from the federal government to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), which then distributes the funds. There are other unmentioned science funding agencies, e.g., the National Research Council of Canada and Genome Canada, which (as far as I know) also receive direct funding. It seems that the panel will not be involved in a comprehensive review of Canada’s research support ecosystem.
Plus, I wonder why everything is being kept ‘confidential’. According the government news release, the panel is tasked with finding ways of “optimizing Canada’s research support system.” Do they have security concerns or is this a temporary state of affairs while the government analysts examine the panel’s report?
If I understand the message from the Canadian Black Scientists Network’s (CBSN) president, Professor Maydianne CB Andrade correctly, the first meeting was in July 2020 and during that meeting the Canadian Black Scientists Network (CBSN)* was born and the website was established (in August 2021?).
The Canadian Black Scientists Network (CBSN) is a national coalition of Black people possessing or pursuing higher degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine/Health (STEMM), together with Allies who are senior leaders with a demonstrated commitment to action for Black inclusion. Our network is young and growing. We were founded by a small group of faculty and held our first meeting in July 2020. Since then, we have expanded to include hundreds of members from across the country, including academics, graduate students and postdocs, research administrators, and STEMM practitioners. We have established a very active steering committee of volunteers, an online presence, and are increasingly recognized as the face of a multidisciplinary, national vanguard of Black excellence in STEMM.
….
We focus on those who identify as Black, which we define as those of Black African descent, which includes those who identify as Black Africans, and those found worldwide who identify as descendants of Black African peoples. We acknowledge and will be open to working in partnership with other organizations that focus on dismantling the challenges, discrimination, and barriers to inclusion in STEMM that are experienced by others. We simultaneously emphasize the need to maintain our network’s focus on Black Canadians. Deliberate, tailored interventions for Black communities are required to remove the long-standing discrimination, exclusion, and oppression that was initially created to justify slavery, and the ways in which those structures and stereotypes still manifest in systematic anti-Black racism in the lives of Canadians (see: the United Nations Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its mission to Canada). We will not shirk from pointing to these realities, but will maintain a strong commitment to joining with all Canadians to build a more equitable society.
…
Prof Maydianne CB Andrade Inaugural President & Co-Founder August 10, 2021
They’ve already been in involved in a number of media programmes and events. That’s a lot to get done (i.e., establishing a network, participating on [10 – 13] panels, podcasts, etc., and organizing a conference [BE-STEMM conference for January 30 – February 2, 2022], developing sponsorships, putting together a website, and more) in a little over 18 months.
Funding, conference, award-winning CBC programme
They must have gotten money from somewhere and while they don’t spell it out, you can find out more about the CBSN’s sponsors (i.e., funders and other supporters) here. As one would expect, you’ll find the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Natural Research Council of Canada (NRC), and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
Information about the BE-STEMM Conference (January 30 – February 2, 2022) can be found here,
We are pleased to announce our first annual conference for Black Excellence in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine/Health (BE-STEMM 2022).
This virtual, interdisciplinary conference will highlight established and rising star Black Canadians in STEMM fields through plenary talks and concurrent talks sessions. Three days of academic programming will be anchored by a fourth day dedicated to leadership summits aimed at sharing best practices for actions supporting justice for Black Canadians in STEMM across sectors, educational levels, professional roles, and intersectional identities. Other highlights include a career fair, public panels and talks, and sessions featuring research of high school and undergraduate students.
Funded by grants from CIHR, NRC, NSERC, FRQNT [Fonds de recherche du Québec], and supported by MITACS [Canadian, national, not-for-profit organization designing and delivering research and training programs] and several academic partners, this bilingual, accessible conference invites all to attend. Black Canadians, Indigenous Canadians, and Allies of all identities from across the STEMM landscape are welcome. Visit this site often for more details on how to participate or become a sponsor.
The timing for the establishment of a Canadian Black Scientists Network couldn’t be much better. Just months after the July 2020 meeting, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) radio broadcasts a February 16, 2021 interview featuring Maydianne Andrade and Kevin Hewitt, co-founders of the Canadian Black Scientists Network, on the Mainstreet NS [news stories?] with Jeff Douglas.
On February 27, 2021, CBC’s Quirks and Quarks radio programme broadcasts an award-winning, three-part special “Black in science: The legacy of racism in science and how Black scientists are moving the dial,” which featured an interview with Angela Saini (author of 2019’s SUPERIOR; The Return of Race Science), as well as, Prof Maydianne CB Andrade (CBSN Inaugural President & Co-Founder), and many others.
The 2021 AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Kavli Science Journalism Award for “Black in science …,” was announced November 10, 2021,
Buckiewicz and Mortillaro, producers for a special edition of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s long-running “Quirks & Quarks” program, looked at the past and future of Black people in science. The episode examined the history of biased and false “race science” that led to misunderstanding and mistreatment of Black people by the scientific and medical community, creating obstacles for them to participate in the scientific process. Buckiewicz and Mortillaro spoke to Black researchers about their work and how they are trying to increase recognition for the contributions of Black scientists and build more opportunities and representation across all disciplines of science. Judge Alexandra Witze, a freelance science journalist, called the program “unflinching in describing science’s racist history, such as how Carl Linnaeus classified people by skin color and how Black scientists have been intentionally marginalized and pushed out of research.” Through a variety of interviews with expert sources, she said, the episode illuminates the work required to make science more equitable. Rich Monastersky, chief features editor for Nature in Washington, D.C., said: “The show explored the difficult and important topic of racism in science—from its historical roots to the impact that it still has and to the ways that researchers are combating the problem. It should be required listening for all students studying science—as well as practicing scientists.” Commenting on the award, Buckiewicz and Mortillaro said: “We often think of the practice of science as being this unflappable, objective quest for knowledge, but it’s about time that we face some hard truths about the way science has been misused to justify the mistreatment of generations of people. With this radio special we really wanted to shed light on the long legacy of racism in science and unpack some of the ways we can do science better.”
Congratulations to Amanda Buckiewicz and Nicole Mortillaro; good luck to the CBSN; and thank you to Alon Eisenstein (https://twitter.com/AlonEisenstein) for the November 20, 2021 tweet that led me to the CBSN.
*Canadian Black Science Network (CBXN) corrected to Canadian Black Scientists Network (CBSN) on February 1, 2022.
There seems to be an explosion (metaphorically and only by Canadian standards) of interest in public perceptions/engagement/awareness of artificial intelligence (see my March 29, 2021 posting “Canada launches its AI dialogues” and these dialogues run until April 30, 2021 plus there’s this April 6, 2021 posting “UNESCO’s Call for Proposals to highlight blind spots in AI Development open ’til May 2, 2021” which was launched in cooperation with Mila-Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute).
Now there’s this, in a March 31, 2020 Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) news release, four new projects were announced. (Admittedly these are not ‘public engagement’ exercises as such but the reports are publicly available and utilized by policymakers.) These are the two projects of most interest to me,
Information and communications technologies have profoundly changed almost every aspect of life and business in the last two decades. While the digital revolution has brought about many positive changes, it has also created opportunities for criminal organizations and malicious actors to target individuals, businesses, and systems.
This assessment will examine promising practices that could help to address threats to public safety related to the use of digital technologies while respecting human rights and privacy.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in science and engineering has the potential to radically transform the nature of scientific inquiry and discovery and produce a wide range of social and economic benefits for Canadians. But, the adoption of these technologies also presents a number of potential challenges and risks.
This assessment will examine the legal/regulatory, ethical, policy and social challenges related to the use of AI technologies in scientific research and discovery.
Sponsor: National Research Council Canada [NRC] (co-sponsors: CIFAR [Canadian Institute for Advanced Research], CIHR [Canadian Institutes of Health Research], NSERC [Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council], and SSHRC [Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council])
…
For today’s posting the focus will be on the AI project, specifically, the April 19, 2021 CCA news release announcing the project’s expert panel,
The Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) has formed an Expert Panel to examine a broad range of factors related to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in scientific research and discovery in Canada. Teresa Scassa, SJD, Canada Research Chair in Information Law and Policy at the University of Ottawa, will serve as Chair of the Panel.
“AI and machine learning may drastically change the fields of science and engineering by accelerating research and discovery,” said Dr. Scassa. “But these technologies also present challenges and risks. A better understanding of the implications of the use of AI in scientific research will help to inform decision-making in this area and I look forward to undertaking this assessment with my colleagues.”
As Chair, Dr. Scassa will lead a multidisciplinary group with extensive expertise in law, policy, ethics, philosophy, sociology, and AI technology. The Panel will answer the following question:
What are the legal/regulatory, ethical, policy and social challenges associated with deploying AI technologies to enable scientific/engineering research design and discovery in Canada?
“We’re delighted that Dr. Scassa, with her extensive experience in AI, the law and data governance, has taken on the role of Chair,” said Eric M. Meslin, PhD, FRSC, FCAHS, President and CEO of the CCA. “I anticipate the work of this outstanding panel will inform policy decisions about the development, regulation and adoption of AI technologies in scientific research, to the benefit of Canada.”
The CCA was asked by the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), along with co-sponsors CIFAR, CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC, to address the question. More information can be found here.
The Expert Panel on AI for Science and Engineering:
Teresa Scassa (Chair), SJD, Canada Research Chair in Information Law and Policy, University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law (Ottawa, ON)
Julien Billot, CEO, Scale AI (Montreal, QC)
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media and Professor of Communication, Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, BC)
Marc Antoine Dilhac, Professor (Philosophy), University of Montreal; Director of Ethics and Politics, Centre for Ethics (Montréal, QC)
B. Courtney Doagoo, AI and Society Fellow, Centre for Law, Technology and Society, University of Ottawa; Senior Manager, Risk Consulting Practice, KPMG Canada (Ottawa, ON)
Abhishek Gupta, Founder and Principal Researcher, Montreal AI Ethics Institute (Montréal, QC)
Richard Isnor, Associate Vice President, Research and Graduate Studies, St. Francis Xavier University (Antigonish, NS)
Ross D. King, Professor, Chalmers University of Technology (Göteborg, Sweden)
Sabina Leonelli, Professor of Philosophy and History of Science, University of Exeter (Exeter, United Kingdom)
Raymond J. Spiteri, Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon, SK)
Who is the expert panel?
Putting together a Canadian panel is an interesting problem especially so when you’re trying to find people of expertise who can also represent various viewpoints both professionally and regionally. Then, there are gender, racial, linguistic, urban/rural, and ethnic considerations.
Statistics
Eight of the panelists could be said to be representing various regions of Canada. Five of those eight panelists are based in central Canada, specifically, Ontario (Ottawa) or Québec (Montréal). The sixth panelist is based in Atlantic Canada (Nova Scotia), the seventh panelist is based in the Prairies (Saskatchewan), and the eighth panelist is based in western Canada, (Vancouver, British Columbia).
The two panelists bringing an international perspective to this project are both based in Europe, specifically, Sweden and the UK.
(sigh) It would be good to have representation from another part of the world. Asia springs to mind as researchers in that region are very advanced in their AI research and applications meaning that their experts and ethicists are likely to have valuable insights.
Four of the ten panelists are women, which is closer to equal representation than some of the other CCA panels I’ve looked at.
As for Indigenous and BIPOC representation, unless one or more of the panelists chooses to self-identify in that fashion, I cannot make any comments. It should be noted that more than one expert panelist focuses on social justice and/or bias in algorithms.
Network of relationships
As you can see, the CCA descriptions for the individual members of the expert panel are a little brief. So, I did a little digging and In my searches, I noticed what seems to be a pattern of relationships among some of these experts. In particular, take note of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and the AI Advisory Council of the Government of Canada.
Individual panelists
Teresa Scassa (Ontario) whose SJD designation signifies a research doctorate in law chairs this panel. Offhand, I can recall only one or two other panels being chaired by women of the 10 or so I’ve reviewed. In addition to her profile page at the University of Ottawa, she hosts her own blog featuring posts such as “How Might Bill C-11 Affect the Outcome of a Clearview AI-type Complaint?” She writes clearly (I didn’t seen any jargon) for an audience that is somewhat informed on the topic.
Mr. Billot is a member of the faculty at HEC Montréal [graduate business school of the Université de Montréal] as an adjunct professor of management and the lead for the CreativeDestructionLab (CDL) and NextAi program in Montreal.
Julien Billot has been President and Chief Executive Officer of Yellow Pages Group Corporation (Y.TO) in Montreal, Quebec. Previously, he was Executive Vice President, Head of Media and Member of the Executive Committee of Solocal Group (formerly PagesJaunes Groupe), the publicly traded and incumbent local search business in France. Earlier experience includes serving as CEO of the digital and new business group of Lagardère Active, a multimedia branch of Lagardère Group and 13 years in senior management positions at France Telecom, notably as Chief Marketing Officer for Orange, the company’s mobile subsidiary.
…
Mr. Billot is a graduate of École Polytechnique (Paris) and from Telecom Paris Tech. He holds a postgraduate diploma (DEA) in Industrial Economics from the University of Paris-Dauphine.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (British Columbia) has a profile on the Simon Fraser University (SFU) website, which provided one of the more interesting (to me personally) biographies,
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, and leads the Digital Democracies Institute which was launched in 2019. The Institute aims to integrate research in the humanities and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice in order to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms and mis/disinformation by fostering critical and creative user practices and alternative paradigms for connection. It has four distinct research streams all led by Dr. Chun: Beyond Verification which looks at authenticity and the spread of disinformation; From Hate to Agonism, focusing on fostering democratic exchange online; Desegregating Network Neighbourhoods, combatting homophily across platforms; and Discriminating Data: Neighbourhoods, Individuals and Proxies, investigating the centrality of race, gender, class and sexuality [emphasis mine] to big data and network analytics.
…
I’m glad to see someone who has focused on ” … the centrality of race, gender, class and sexuality to big data and network analytics.” Even more interesting to me was this from her CV (curriculum vitae),
Professor, Department of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, July 2010-June 2018
.•Affiliated Faculty, Multimedia & Electronic Music Experiments (MEME), Department of Music,2017.
•Affiliated Faculty, History of Art and Architecture, March 2012-
.•Graduate Field Faculty, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Sept 2008-.[sic]
….
[all emphases mine]
And these are some of her credentials,
Ph.D., English, Princeton University, 1999. •Certificate, School of Criticism and Theory, Dartmouth College, Summer 1995.
M.A., English, Princeton University, 1994.
B.A.Sc., Systems Design Engineering and English, University of Waterloo, Canada, 1992. •first class honours and a Senate Commendation for Excellence for being the first student to graduate from the School of Engineering with a double major
It’s about time the CCA started integrating some of kind of arts perspective into their projects. (Although, I can’t help wondering if this was by accident rather than by design.)
Marc Antoine Dilhac, an associate professor at l’Université de Montréal, he, like Billot, graduated from a French university, in his case, the Sorbonne. Here’s more from Dilhac’s profile on the Mila website,
Marc-Antoine Dilhac (Ph.D., Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) is a professor of ethics and political philosophy at the Université de Montréal and an associate member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. He currently holds a CIFAR [Canadian Institute for Advanced Research] Chair in AI ethics (2019-2024), and was previously Canada Research Chair in Public Ethics and Political Theory 2014-2019. He specialized in theories of democracy and social justice, as well as in questions of applied ethics. He published two books on the politics of toleration and inclusion (2013, 2014). His current research focuses on the ethical and social impacts of AI and issues of governance and institutional design, with a particular emphasis on how new technologies are changing public relations and political structures.
In 2017, he instigated the project of the Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of AI and chaired its scientific committee. In 2020, as director of Algora Lab, he led an international deliberation process as part of UNESCO’s consultation on its recommendation on the ethics of AI.
In 2019, he founded Algora Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory advancing research on the ethics of AI and developing a deliberative approach to the governance of AI and digital technologies. He is co-director of Deliberation at the Observatory on the social impacts of AI and digital technologies (OBVIA), and contributes to the OECD Policy Observatory (OECD.AI) as a member of its expert network ONE.AI.
He sits on the AI Advisory Council of the Government of Canada and co-chair its Working Group on Public Awareness.
Formerly known as Mila only, Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute is a beneficiary of the 2017 Canadian federal budget’s inception of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, which named CIFAR as an agency that would benefit as the hub and would also distribute funds for artificial intelligence research to (mainly) three agencies: Mila in Montréal, the Vector Institute in Toronto, and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AMII; Edmonton).
Consequently, Dilhac’s involvement with CIFAR is not unexpected but when added to his presence on the AI Advisory Council of the Government of Canada and his role as co-chair of its Working Group on Public Awareness, one of the co-sponsors for this future CCA report, you get a sense of just how small the Canadian AI ethics and public awareness community is.
Add in CIFAR’s Open Dialogue: AI in Canada series (ongoing until April 30, 2021) which is being held in partnership with the AI Advisory Council of the Government of Canada (see my March 29, 2021 posting for more details about the dialogues) amongst other familiar parties and you see a web of relations so tightly interwoven that if you could produce masks from it you’d have superior COVID-19 protection to N95 masks.
These kinds of connections are understandable and I have more to say about them in my final comments.
B. Courtney Doagoo has a profile page at the University of Ottawa, which fills in a few information gaps,
As a Fellow, Dr. Doagoo develops her research on the social, economic and cultural implications of AI with a particular focus on the role of laws, norms and policies [emphasis mine]. She also notably advises Dr. Florian Martin-Bariteau, CLTS Director, in the development of a new research initiative on those topical issues, and Dr. Jason Millar in the development of the Canadian Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Ethical Design Lab (CRAiEDL).
Dr. Doagoo completed her Ph.D. in Law at the University of Ottawa in 2017. In her interdisciplinary research, she used empirical methods to learn about and describe the use of intellectual property law and norms in creative communities. Following her doctoral research, she joined the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Coordination Office in New York as a legal intern and contributed to developing the joint initiative on gender and innovation in collaboration with UNESCO and UN Women. She later joined the International Law Research Program at the Centre for International Governance Innovation as a Post-Doctoral Fellow, where she conducted research in technology and law focusing on intellectual property law, artificial intelligence and data governance.
Dr. Doagoo completed her LL.L. at the University of Ottawa, and LL.M. in Intellectual Property Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law [a law school at Yeshiva University in New York City]. In between her academic pursuits, Dr. Doagoo has been involved with different technology start-ups, including the one she is currently leading aimed at facilitating access to legal services. She’s also an avid lover of the arts and designed a course on Arts and Cultural Heritage Law taught during her doctoral studies at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law.
It’s probably because I don’t know enough but this “the role of laws, norms and policies” seems bland to the point of meaningless. The rest is more informative and brings it back to the arts with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun at SFU.
Doagoo’s LinkedIn profile offers an unexpected link to this expert panel’s chairperson, Teresa Scassa (in addition to both being lawyers whose specialties are in related fields and on faculty or fellow at the University of Ottawa),
Soft-funded Research Bursary
Dr. Teresa Scassa
2014
I’m not suggesting any conspiracies; it’s simply that this is a very small community with much of it located in central and eastern Canada and possible links into the US. For example, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, prior to her SFU appointment in December 2018, worked and studied in the eastern US for over 25 years after starting her academic career at the University of Waterloo (Ontario).
Abhishek Gupta provided me with a challenging search. His LinkedIn profile yielded some details (I’m not convinced the man sleeps), Note: I have made some formatting changes and removed the location, ‘Montréal area’ from some descriptions
Experience
Microsoft Graphic Software Engineer II – Machine Learning Microsoft
Jul 2018 – Present – 2 years 10 months
Machine Learning – Commercial Software Engineering team
Serves on the CSE Responsible AI Board
Founder and Principal Researcher Montreal AI Ethics Institute
May 2018 – Present – 3 years
Institute creating tangible and practical research in the ethical, safe and inclusive development of AI. For more information, please visit https://montrealethics.ai
Visiting AI Ethics Researcher, Future of Work, International Visitor Leadership Program U.S. Department of State
Aug 2019 – Present – 1 year 9 months
Selected to represent Canada on the future of work
Responsible AI Lead, Data Advisory Council Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities
Jun 2020 – Present – 11 months
Faculty Associate, Frankfurt Big Data Lab Goethe University
Mar 2020 – Present – 1 year 2 months
Advisor for the Z-inspection project
Associate Member LF AI Foundation
May 2020 – Present – 1 year
Author MIT Technology Review
Sep 2020 – Present – 8 months
Founding Editorial Board Member, AI and Ethics Journal Springer Nature
Jul 2020 – Present – 10 months
…
Education
McGill University Bachelor of Science (BS)Computer Science
2012 – 2015
…
Exhausting, eh? He also has an eponymous website and the Montreal AI Ethics Institute can found here where Gupta and his colleagues are “Democratizing AI ethics literacy.” My hat’s off to Gupta getting on an expert panel for CCA is quite an achievement for someone without the usual academic and/or industry trappings.
Richard Isnor, based in Nova Scotia and associate vice president of research & graduate studies at St. Francis Xavier University (StFX), seems to have some connection to northern Canada (see the reference to Nunavut Research Institute below); he’s certainly well connected to various federal government agencies according to his profile page,
Prior to joining StFX, he was Manager of the Atlantic Regional Office for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), based in Moncton, NB. Previously, he was Director of Innovation Policy and Science at the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa and also worked for three years with the National Research Council of Canada [NRC] managing Biotechnology Research Initiatives and the NRC Genomics and Health Initiative.
Richard holds a D. Phil. in Science and Technology Policy Studies from the University of Sussex, UK; a Master’s in Environmental Studies from Dalhousie University [Nova Scotia]; and a B. Sc. (Hons) in Biochemistry from Mount Allison University [New Burnswick]. His primary interest is in science policy and the public administration of research; he has worked in science and technology policy or research administrative positions for Environment Canada, Natural Resources Canada, the Privy Council Office, as well as the Nunavut Research Institute. [emphasis mine]
I don’t know what Dr. Isnor’s work is like but I’m hopeful he (along with Spiteri) will be able to provide a less ‘big city’ perspective to the proceedings.
(For those unfamiliar with Canadian cities, Montreal [three expert panelists] is the second largest city in the country, Ottawa [two expert panelists] as the capital has an outsize view of itself, Vancouver [one expert panelist] is the third or fourth largest city in the country for a total of six big city representatives out of eight Canadian expert panelists.)
Ross D. King, professor of machine intelligence at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology, might be best known for Adam, also known as, Robot Scientist. Here’s more about King, from his Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),
King completed a Bachelor of Science degree in Microbiology at the University of Aberdeen in 1983 and went on to study for a Master of Science degree in Computer Science at the University of Newcastle in 1985. Following this, he completed a PhD at The Turing Institute [emphasis mine] at the University of Strathclyde in 1989[3] for work on developing machine learning methods for protein structure prediction.[7]
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King’s research interests are in the automation of science, drug design, AI, machine learning and synthetic biology.[8][9] He is probably best known for the Robot Scientist[4][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] project which has created a robot that can:
hypothesize to explain observations
devise experiments to test these hypotheses
physically run the experiments using laboratory robotics
… a laboratory robot created and developed by a group of scientists including Ross King, Kenneth Whelan, Ffion Jones, Philip Reiser, Christopher Bryant, Stephen Muggleton, Douglas Kell and Steve Oliver.[2][6][7][8][9][10]
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… Adam became the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators.[5][17][18]
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Sabina Leonelli, professor of philosophy and history of science at the University of Exeter, is the only person for whom I found a Twitter feed (@SabinaLeonelli). Here’s a bit more from her Wikipedia entry Note: Links have been removed),
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Originally from Italy, Leonelli moved to the UK for a BSc degree in History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science at University College London and a MSc degree in History and Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics. Her doctoral research was carried out in the Netherlands at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam with Henk W. de Regt and Hans Radder. Before joining the Exeter faculty, she was a research officer under Mary S. Morgan at the Department of Economic History of the London School of Economics.
Leonelli is the Co-Director of the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences (Egenis)[3] and a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute [emphases mine] in London.[4] She is also Editor-in-Chief of the international journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences[5] and Associate Editor for the Harvard Data Science Review.[6] She serves as External Faculty for the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.[7]
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Notice that Ross King and Sabina Leonelli both have links to The Alan Turing Institute (“We believe data science and artificial intelligence will change the world”), although the institute’s link to the University of Strathclyde (Scotland) where King studied seems a bit tenuous.
Do check out Leonelli’s profile at the University of Exeter as it’s comprehensive.
Raymond J. Spiteri, professor and director of the Centre for High Performance Computing, Department of Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan, has a profile page at the university the likes of which I haven’t seen in several years perhaps due to its 2013 origins. His other university profile page can best be described as minimalist.
Raymond Spiteri is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan. He performed his graduate work as a member of the Institute for Applied Mathematics at the University of British Columbia. He was a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University and held faculty positions at Acadia University and Dalhousie University before joining USask in 2004. He serves on the Executive Committee of the WestGrid High-Performance Computing Consortium with Compute/Calcul Canada. He was a MITACS Project Leader from 2004-2012 and served in the role of Mitacs Regional Scientific Director for the Prairie Provinces between 2008 and 2011.
Spiteri’s areas of research are numerical analysis, scientific computing, and high-performance computing. His area of specialization is the analysis and implementation of efficient time-stepping methods for differential equations. He actively collaborates with scientists, engineers, and medical experts of all flavours. He also has a long record of industry collaboration with companies such as IBM and Boeing.
Spiteri has been lifetime member of CAIMS/SCMAI since 2000. He helped co-organize the 2004 Annual Meeting at Dalhousie and served on the Cecil Graham Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee from 2005 to 2009, acting as chair from 2007. He has been an active participant in CAIMS, serving several times on the Scientific Committee for the Annual Meeting, as well as frequently attending and organizing mini-symposia. Spiteri believes it is important for applied mathematics to play a major role in the efforts to meet Canada’s most pressing societal challenges, including the sustainability of our healthcare system, our natural resources, and the environment.
Another biographical note: I obtained my B.Sc. degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Western Ontario [also known as, Western University] in 1990. My advisor was Dr. M.A.H. (Paddy) Nerenberg, after whom the Nerenberg Lecture Series is named. Here is an excerpt from the description, put here is his honour, as a model for the rest of us:
The Nerenberg Lecture Series is first and foremost about people and ideas. Knowledge is the true treasure of humanity, accrued and passed down through the generations. Some of it, particularly science and its language, mathematics, is closed in practice to many because of technical barriers that can only be overcome at a high price. These technical barriers form part of the remarkable fractures that have formed in our legacy of knowledge. We are so used to those fractures that they have become almost invisible to us, but they are a source of profound confusion about what is known.
The Nerenberg Lecture is named after the late Morton (Paddy) Nerenberg, a much-loved professor and researcher born on 17 March– hence his nickname. He was a Professor at Western for more than a quarter century, and a founding member of the Department of Applied Mathematics there. A successful researcher and accomplished teacher, he believed in the unity of knowledge, that scientific and mathematical ideas belong to everyone, and that they are of human importance. He regretted that they had become inaccessible to so many, and anticipated serious consequences from it. [emphases mine] The series honors his appreciation for the democracy of ideas. He died in 1993 at the age of 57.
So, we have the expert panel.
Thoughts about the panel and the report
As I’ve noted previously here and elsewhere, assembling any panels whether they’re for a single event or for a longer term project such as producing a report is no easy task. Looking at the panel, there’s some arts representation, smaller urban centres are also represented, and some of the members have experience in more than one region in Canada. I was also much encouraged by Spiteri’s acknowledgement of his advisor’s, Morton (Paddy) Nerenberg, passionate commitment to the idea that “scientific and mathematical ideas belong to everyone.”
Kudos to the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) organizers.
That said, this looks like an exceptionally Eurocentric panel. Unusually, there’s no representation from the US unless you count Chun who has spent the majority of her career in the US with only a little over two years at Simon Fraser University on Canada’s West Coast.
There’s weakness to a strategy (none of the ten or so CCA reports I’ve reviewed here deviates from this pattern) that seems to favour international participants from Europe and/or the US (also, sometimes, Australia/New Zealand). This leaves out giant chunks of the international community and brings us dangerously close to an echo chamber.
The same problem exists regionally and with various Canadian communities, which are acknowledged more in spirit than in actuality, e.g., the North, rural, indigenous, arts, etc.
Getting back to the ‘big city’ emphsais noted earlier, two people from Ottawa and three from Montreal; half of the expert panel lives within a two hour train ride of each other. (For those who don’t know, that’s close by Canadian standards. For comparison, a train ride from Vancouver to Seattle [US] is about four hours, a short trip when compared to a 24 hour train trip to the closest large Canadian cities.)
I appreciate that it’s not a simple problem but my concern is that it’s never acknowledged by the CCA. Perhaps they could include a section in the report acknowledging the issues and how the expert panel attempted to address them , in other words, transparency. Coincidentally, transparency, which has been related to trust, have both been identified as big issues with artificial intelligence.
As for solutions, these reports get sent to external reviewers and, prior to the report, outside experts are sometimes brought in as the panel readies itself. That would be two opportunities afforded by their current processes.
Anyway, good luck with the report and I look forward to seeing it.
This world-class symposium, the sixth event of its kind, will bring together a record number (1000+) of renowned Canadian and international experts from across the nanomedicines field to:
highlight the discoveries and innovations in nanomedicines that are contributing to global progress in acute, chronic and orphan disease treatment and management;
present up-to-date diagnostic and therapeutic nanomedicine approaches to addressing the challenges of COVID-19; and
facilitate discussion among nanomedicine researchers and innovators and UBC and NMIN clinician-scientists, basic researchers, trainees, and research partners.
Since 2014, Vancouver Nanomedicine Day has advanced nanomedicine research, knowledge mobilization and commercialization in Canada by sharing high-impact findings and facilitating interaction—among researchers, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and life science and startup biotechnology companies—to catalyze research collaboration.
[downloaded from https://www.nanomedicines.ca/nmd-2020/]
I have a few observations, First, Robert Langer is a big deal. Here are a few highlights from his Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),
Robert Samuel Langer, Jr. FREng[2] (born August 29, 1948) is an American chemical engineer, scientist, entrepreneur, inventor and one of the twelve Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[3]
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Langer holds over 1,350 granted or pending patents.[3][29] He is one of the world’s most highly cited researchers, having authored nearly 1,500 scientific papers, and has participated in the founding of multiple technology companies.[30][31]
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Langer is the youngest person in history (at 43) to be elected to all three American science academies: the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine. He was also elected as a charter member of National Academy of Inventors.[32] He was elected as an International Fellow[2] of the Royal Academy of Engineering[2] in 2010.
It’s all about commercializing the research—or is it?
(This second observation is a little more complicated and requires a little context.) The NMIN is one of Canada’s Networks of Centres of Excellence (who thought that name up? …sigh), from the NMIN About page,
The NCEs seem to be firmly fixed on finding pathways to commercialization (from the NCE About page) Note: All is not as it seems,
Canada’s global economic competitiveness [emphasis mine] depends on making new discoveries and transforming them into products, services [emphasis mine] and processes that improve the lives of Canadians. To meet this challenge, the Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE) offers a suite of programs that mobilize Canada’s best research, development and entrepreneurial [emphasis mine] expertise and focus it on specific issues and strategic areas.
NCE programs meet Canada’s needs to focus a critical mass of research resources on social and economic challenges, commercialize [emphasis mine] and apply more of its homegrown research breakthroughs, increase private-sector R&D, [emphasis mine] and train highly qualified people. As economic [emphasis mine] and social needs change, programs have evolved to address new challenges.
The fund will invest $275 million over the next 5 years beginning in fiscal 2018-19, and $65 million ongoing, to fund international, interdisciplinary, fast-breaking and high-risk research.
NFRF is composed of three streams to support groundbreaking research.
Exploration generates opportunities for Canada to build strength in high-risk, high-reward and interdisciplinary research;
Transformation provides large-scale support for Canada to build strength and leadership in interdisciplinary and transformative research; and
International enhances opportunities for Canadian researchers to participate in research with international partners.
As you can see there’s no reference to commercialization or economic challenges.
Personally
Here at last is the second observation, I find it hard to believe that the government of Canada has given up on the idea of commercializing research and increasing the country’s economic competitiveness through research. Certainly, Langer’s virtual appearance at Vancouver Nanomedicine Day 2020, suggests that at least some corners of the Canadian research establishment are remaining staunchly entrepreneurial.
After all, the only Canadian government ministry with science in its name is this one: Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), as of Sept. 11, 2020.. (The other ‘science’ ministries are Natural Resources Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Health Canada, and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.) ISED is not exactly subtle. Intriguingly the latest review on the state of science and technology in Canada was released on April 10, 2018 (from the April 10, 2018 Council of Canadian Academies CCA] news release),
Canada remains strong in research output and impact, capacity for R&D and innovation at risk: New expert panel report
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While Canada is a highly innovative country, with a robust research base and thriving communities of technology start-ups, significant barriers—such as a lack of managerial skills, the experience needed to scale-up companies, and foreign acquisition of high-tech firms—often prevent the translation of innovation into wealth creation.[emphasis mine] The result is a deficit of technology companies growing to scale in Canada, and a loss of associated economic and social benefits.This risks establishing a vicious cycle, where successful companies seek growth opportunities elsewhere due to a lack of critical skills and experience in Canada guiding companies through periods of rapid expansion.
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According to the CCA’s [2018 report] Summary webpage, it was Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada which requested the report. (I wrote up a two-part commentary under one of my favourite titles: “The Hedy Lamarr of international research: Canada’s Third assessment of The State of Science and Technology and Industrial Research and Development in Canada.” Part 1 and Part 2)
I will be fascinated to watch the NFRF and science commercialization situations as they develop.
It may be too soon to describe it as a fallback position but Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, seems to return to science when he wants to generate or bask in positive news coverage. Coming off a not entirely successful state visit to India (February 17 – 23, 2018), he received some of the worst notices of his international diplomatic efforts to date. (This February 23, 2018 article, ‘India to Justin Trudeau: Stop trying so hard‘, by Vidhi Doshi for The Washington Post was one of the kinder pieces while this February 25, 2018 article, ‘Why Justin Trudeau’s India tour turned out to be a diplomatic disaster‘, by Candice Malcolm and published on economictimes.indiatimes.com was one of the more scathing.
Budget 2018: We’re in the money
The announcement of the federal budget (February 27, 2018) might be viewed as offering welcome relief from torrents of criticism. From a March 7, 2018 Canadian Science Policy Centre announcement (CSPC; received via email) about the publication of a series of opinion pieces (editorials) concerning the 2018 federal budget,
CSPC’s Official Statement on the Federal Budget 2018
Déclaration officielle du CPSC concernant le budget fédéral 2018
Canadian Science Policy Centre commends the Government of Canada for the strong investment in Science projected in the Budget 2018 for the next five years. The Centre congratulates all Canadians, in particular members of the Fundamental Science Review Panel and the entire community who strongly supported the panel recommendations and the investment in Science.
Le Centre sur les politiques scientifiques canadiennes félicite le Gouvernement du Canada pour son investissement substantiel en sciences prévu dans le budget 2018 pour les cinq prochaines années. Le Centre félicite tous les Canadiens, plus particulièrement les membres du Comité de l’examen du soutien aux sciences ainsi que la communauté dans son ensemble, qui a vivement appuyé les recommandations du Comité et l’investissement en sciences.
You can find the editorials here (17 in total including an interview with Science Minister Kirsty Duncan … surprisingly[!!!!], she’s very proud of the government’s budget for science) along with editorials on other issues. Russ Roberts’ piece (Federal Budget 2018 – Missed Another Opportunity to Maximize ROI on Canadians’ Investments in Innovation) stands out as it is rather ‘grumpy’ but only in comparison to pretty much everyone else who is pleased to one degree or another.
The editorials put me in mind of an old song celebrating money in a Busby Berkeley production. Prepare yourself, over the top was where he liked to live,
Budget 2018: a little more nuance
Brooke Struck over on sciencemetrics.org offers some incisive analysis in two separate blog postings. First, he tackles the money in a February 28, 2018 posting (Note: Links have been removed),
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The Naylor report [links to my 3-part series on the report also known as, INVESTING IN CANADA’S FUTURE; Strengthening the Foundations of Canadian Research {Review of fundamental research final report} follow at the end of this posting] contained many recommendations, but the one that got the most press—and surely is the focus of attention right now, given the release of the budget yesterday—is the recommendation that funding for the three granting councils be increased. The amounts were quite high, too, calling for an increase from $3.5 billion to $4.8 billion to remediate slides over the decade of the previous government’s term.
The timing of the report’s release was wise, as a release before that year’s budget might have created the expectation that the money would flow immediately, which simply doesn’t fit with the timelines of federal budget development processes. From April 2017 to now, the research community in Canada has rallied around the report and its recommendations, sustaining a campaign to keep research (and its funding) in the national discussion.
One note that the panel emphasized was that the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) had been hit particularly hard. The rule of thumb is apparently that SSHRC is supposed to get 20% of the total granting council budget, while 40% goes to the natural sciences & engineering [Natural Sciences and Engineering Council] (NSERC) and 40% goes to health research [Canadian Institutes of Health Research] (CIHR). SSHRC’s portion had consistently clocked in at around 15%.
Furthermore, the report emphasized that the underlying reasoning behind the 40-40-20 split might not hold water anymore, as the social sciences and humanities really don’t have any other major sources of funding beyond government support, whereas other types of research can draw on support from other players as well. The 40-40-20 split from government is not a 40-40-20 split in practice once additional sources are considered in the equation.
Delivery: as promised?
And that brings us to yesterday’s budget. While the report had called for an injection of $1.3 billion, the finance minister apparently couldn’t scrape together more than a measly $925 million—which, of course, is a huge amount of money. Some will lament the gap and rend their shirts in twain about promises broken, while others will cheer the victory of science retaking its rightful place through another #PromiseKept. That increase translated into a 25% bump in fundamental research spending, so I guess how you feel about it depends on your views about how much a 25% increase really means. For those keeping score at home, that apparently closes the gap to about 90% of real spending power levels before the slides under Harper.
But was it a 25% increase for everyone? No, the $925 million was not split evenly between the councils. Identical portions of $354.7 million will go to NSERC and CIHR (roughly 38% each from the new money) while $215.5 million will go to SSHRC (just over 23% of the new money). Comparing their funding levels this morning to those of yesterday morning, NSERC and CIHR saw increases of about 20%–25%, while SSHRC saw an increase of over 40%.
But did the government really heed the advice of their panel about getting back to the 40-40-20 allocation across the councils (while acknowledging that even that split is perhaps not sufficient anymore)? With its increase, SSHRC will be up from 15% of the tri-council total to about 16.5% of the total. That sounds like progress.
On the flip side, though, the government has just announced a massive injection to research spending, with an ongoing annual increase after that (following the same split as the one-time boost). No further increases are likely to happen again in the near future, and it would take three more increases just like this one for SSHRC to reach its 20%. The social sciences and humanities have made some headway, but they aren’t likely to get any closer than this to their 20%. The big investment has been made, and this will be the status quo for a while—consider that the Naylor panel was the first of its kind in 40 years.
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I don’t think this excerpt does justice to Struck’s posting and recommend you read it in its entirety if you have the time and there’s this March 8, 2018 posting where he examines ‘evidence’ in relation to the budget (Note: Links have been removed),
The new budget provides a lot of money for science. It also emphasizes the importance of evidence-based decision-making to government, employing the term “evidence-based” about 20 times in the document. A lot of the new science money is earmarked to increase science for policy as well, separate from the fundamental science funding we discussed last week.
For example, Statistics Canada will get millions of extra dollars, in one-time injections as well as increases to ongoing, regular operating budgets. Why? “Better data will… support [the Government’s] commitment to evidence-based policy-making.” (p. 187). There are also hundreds of millions of dollars for science conducted within the federal government: labs and facilities (p.83) as well as highlighted projects (e.g., ocean and freshwater surveillance, p. 98). Again, all this is on top of the $925 million for fundamental research outside of government, administered by the funding councils. All told, that’s a big boost for research.
What about the uptake of that research in decision-making? There’s a whole section in Chapter 2 entitled “Placing Evidence at the Centre of Program Evaluation and Design.” The result? Statistics Canada gets $1 million annually to “improve performance evaluations for innovation-related programs,” and the Treasury Board gets $2 million annually to build an internal team for innovation performance evaluation, drawing on (among other things) the StatsCan innovation data.
Beyond that, the previous budget outlined $2 million annually for the federal Chief Science Advisor and her secretariat. That outlay doesn’t mention improving evidence-based decision-making, though it’s a key part of the CSA’s mandate. Together, what we see here is that there’s a huge disparity between the new money being spent on research and data, and the new money being spent to develop “a strong culture of evidence-based decision-making” (Budget 2018, p. 276).
Reading between the line items
The funding disparity suggests that the government feels that evidence-based policymaking is hampered primarily by supply-side problems. If we just pushed more science in the front end, we’d get a better flow of evidence through the policymaking pipeline. There’s almost no money to patch up whatever holes there may be in that pipeline between the research money inputs and the better policy outputs.
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This quality of analysis is what one would hope for from the Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC). Perhaps once their initial euphoria and back-patting has passed, the CSPC commentators will offer more nuanced takes on the budget.
Budget 2018: The good includes a new intellectual property strategy
First, there’s a lot to like in the 2018 budget as the CSPC folks noticed. Advancing gender equality, supporting innovation and business, supporting fundamental research through the tri-council agencies, and more are all to the good.
Surprisingly, no one else seems to have mentioned a new (?) intellectual property strategy introduced in the document (from Chapter 2: Progress; scroll down about 80% of the way, Note: The formatting has been changed),
Budget 2018 proposes measures in support of a new Intellectual Property Strategy to help Canadian entrepreneurs better understand and protect intellectual property, and get better access to shared intellectual property.
What Is a Patent Collective?
A Patent Collective is a way for firms to share, generate, and license or purchase intellectual property. The collective approach is intended to help Canadian firms ensure a global “freedom to operate”, mitigate the risk of infringing a patent, and aid in the defence of a patent infringement suit.
Budget 2018 proposes to invest $85.3 million over five years, starting in 2018–19, with $10 million per year ongoing, in support of the strategy. The Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development will bring forward the full details of the strategy in the coming months, including the following initiatives to increase the intellectual property literacy of Canadian entrepreneurs, and to reduce costs and create incentives for Canadian businesses to leverage their intellectual property:
To better enable firms to access and share intellectual property, the Government proposes to provide $30 million in 2019–20 to pilot a Patent Collective. This collective will work with Canada’s entrepreneurs to pool patents, so that small and medium-sized firms have better access to the critical intellectual property they need to grow their businesses.
To support the development of intellectual property expertise and legal advice for Canada’s innovation community, the Government proposes to provide $21.5 million over five years, starting in 2018–19, to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. This funding will improve access for Canadian entrepreneurs to intellectual property legal clinics at universities. It will also enable the creation of a team in the federal government to work with Canadian entrepreneurs to help them develop tailored strategies for using their intellectual property and expanding into international markets.
To support strategic intellectual property tools that enable economic growth, Budget 2018 also proposes to provide $33.8 million over five years, starting in 2018–19, to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, including $4.5 million for the creation of an intellectual property marketplace. This marketplace will be a one-stop, online listing of public sector-owned intellectual property available for licensing or sale to reduce transaction costs for businesses and researchers, and to improve Canadian entrepreneurs’ access to public sector-owned intellectual property.
The Government will also consider further measures, including through legislation, in support of the new intellectual property strategy.
Helping All Canadians Harness Intellectual Property
Intellectual property is one of our most valuable resources, and every Canadian business owner should understand how to protect and use it.
To better understand what groups of Canadians are benefiting the most from intellectual property, Budget 2018 proposes to provide Statistics Canada with $2 million over three years to conduct an intellectual property awareness and use survey. This survey will help identify how Canadians understand and use intellectual property, including groups that have traditionally been less likely to use intellectual property, such as women and Indigenous entrepreneurs. The results of the survey should help the Government better meet the needs of these groups through education and awareness initiatives.
The Canadian Intellectual Property Office will also increase the number of education and awareness initiatives that are delivered in partnership with business, intermediaries and academia to ensure Canadians better understand, integrate and take advantage of intellectual property when building their business strategies. This will include targeted initiatives to support underrepresented groups.
Finally, Budget 2018 also proposes to invest $1 million over five years to enable representatives of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples to participate in discussions at the World Intellectual Property Organization related to traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, an important form of intellectual property.
It’s not wholly clear what they mean by ‘intellectual property’. The focus seems to be on patents as they are the only intellectual property (as opposed to copyright and trademarks) singled out in the budget. As for how the ‘patent collective’ is going to meet all its objectives, this budget supplies no clarity on the matter. On the plus side, I’m glad to see that indigenous peoples’ knowledge is being acknowledged as “an important form of intellectual property” and I hope the discussions at the World Intellectual Property Organization are fruitful.
That said, it’s good to see the government adopting a fresh approach to the matter.
Budget 2018: Who’s watching over us?
Russ Roberts (CSPC editorial) makes an excellent point in his piece about getting some sort of return on investment (ROI) made by the Canadian government on behalf of its taxpayers. One note, the issue is not new and unique to this Liberal government. As far as I’m aware, there never has been any mechanism for determining whether taxpayers’ money has been well spent and other than knowing that insulin was a huge boon to the world and could be described as a great ROI. So, I’m not suggesting that everything has to be measured in dollars and cents but just that we occasionally give it some thought.
Another aspect I’d like to see considered is oversight. In my March 5, 2018 posting I posed a question, What is happening with Alberta’s (Canada) Ingenuity Lab? In sum, Dr. Carlo Montemagno came to Alberta to head up the lab which is funded to the tune of $100M over 10 years. He was making over $500,000/year when he left some five years into the project to become Chancellor at Southern Illinois University (SIU). I had some questions about Montemagno’s tenure in Alberta. For example, was hiring his daughter and son-in-law (as he did again at SIU where he has received severe criticism) to work at the Ingenuity Lab a good idea? It may have been but it seems as if the question was never asked. Other questions also present themselves such as, what is happening to an industrial pilot project on carbon transformation that Montemagno touted?
Increasingly, I’m wondering what sort of oversight these heavily funded science projects are receiving, especially in light of the government’s massive foul up over the Phoenix pay system for federal government employees. (I’m aware that I’m conflating science and technology.) We’re entering the third year of a botched (a very polite term) and increasingly expensive payroll technology implementation. Take for example this recommendation from the Canada Treasury Board’s Lessons Learned from the Transformation of Pay Administration Initiative webpage which has me shaking my head,
Fully test the IT Solution before launch
Lesson 14: Launch any required new IT solution only after it has been fully tested with end-to-end real-life simulations using a broad spectrum of real users and when all doubts regarding success have been addressed and verified independently.
The federal government has over 300,000 employees whose payroll was migrated to this system and they didn’t test it (!) or so I infer from this recommendation. (According to a CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] news online August 24, 2017 news item, a little over 1/2 of Canada’s federal public servants have been affected,
Nearly one in every two federal public servants paid through the problem-plagued Phoenix system has opened a file seeking redress for a pay issue, CBC News has learned.
As of Aug. 8 [2017], there were 156,035 employees who had been waiting at least 30 days to have their pay complaint dealt with, according to data released to Radio-Canada by a government source.
That number represents nearly one-half of the 313,734 public servants paid through Phoenix. It’s also the first instance in which the scope of the Phoenix payroll issues has been laid clear in terms of people affected, rather than in terms of “transactions” or “cases.”
The documents show the government has been tracking the numbers of individuals affected by Phoenix since at least June 26 [2017].
“It’s shocking that we’ve just learned that they were hiding those numbers, because they didn’t want to show how big that catastrophe is for our public servants,” said Alexandre Boulerice, the NDP’s [New Democratic Party] finance critic.
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Interestingly, the government is hoping to introduce more technology into their governance. Michael Karlin’s (@supergovernance) Twitter feed and his latest essay provide some insight into the government’s preparations for the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), Note: Links have been removed,
Towards Rules for Automation in Government
Caveat: This is a personal view of work underway that I’m leading. What I describe is subject to incredible change as this policy work winds its way through government and consultations. Our approach may change for reasons that I’m simply not privy to, and that’s fine. This is meant to solicit ideas, but also show the complexity about what it takes to make policy. I hope that people find it useful, particularly students of public admin. It also represents my view of the world only, and neither my organization’s or the Government of Canada writ large.
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AI is a rapidly evolving space, and trying to create rules in a time of disruption is risky. Too severe and innovation can be hindered; this is unacceptable during a time when the Government of Canada is embracing digital culture. On the other hand, if the rules don’t have meaning and teeth, and Canadians will not be sufficiently protected from the negative outcomes of this technology, like this or this. Trying to strike the right balance between facilitating innovation while being protective of right is a challenge, and one that benefits from ongoing discussions with different sectors across the country. It also means that I might work hard to build a consensus around a set of rules that we try out and have to scrap and redesign after a year in deployment because they don’t work.
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Let’s not forget the 2017 Canadian federal budget introduced funding ($125M) for a Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy to be administered by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). So, federal funding for science is often intimately linked to technology., hence the conflation.
Sunny ways: a discussion between Justin Trudeau and Bill Nye
Billed as a discussion about the Canadian federal 2018 budget and science, Justin Trudeau sat down with Bill Nye, a US science popularizer and television personality on March 6, 2018 for about an hour. Kate Young, parliamentary secretary to the minister of science (Kirsty Duncan) was moderator.
As to be expected Bill Nye did not know much about the budget and the funding it provided for science, technology, research, and innovation but he was favourably impressed overall. In short, if you were looking for an incisive policy discussion, this was not the venue for it.
The conversation was quite genial throughout. Paul Wells in his March 6, 2018 article for Maclean’s offers a good summary of the main points and answers a few questions I had (for example, why a US television science personality?),
News of this bit of show-business [televised discussion] drew a fair bit of advance comment, most of it on Twitter on Monday night, some of it critical or worried. Some who don’t like Nye’s climate-change activism said he’s not a scientist. This is, by many definitions, true: He’s a mechanical engineer. I’m here to tell you that it’s hard to get a degree in mechanical engineering without learning some science, but for those inclined to draw distinctions, fill your boots. Others wished a Canadian scientist had been Trudeau’s chosen interlocutor, instead of some TV Yankee.
Part of the answer to that came from the U of O students, who were pleased to see the Prime Minister but plainly way more pleased to see Bill Nye the Science Guy. There simply isn’t a Canadian scientist (or science-friendly mechanical engineer) who would have provoked as much excitement. [emphasis mine; sadly true]
My own concern was that Nye, who has been critical of the Trump administration, might attempt to draw distinctions between the blackened anti-science hell-pit of his own country and the bright shiny city on a hill called Canada. Such distinctions would have been misinformed, for reasons I’ll explain in a bit, but in fact Nye mostly managed to avoid making them.
Mostly he and Trudeau just shot the breeze, in ways that were low on detail but not unpleasant.
One comment that Trudeau made raised a lot of interest on Paul Wells’ fTwitfer feed (#inklessPW), ‘all babies are scientists’. Wells’ notes where this idea likely originated (Note: A link has been removed),
The babies-are-scientists bit, I heard from a former New Brunswick education minister named Kelly Lamrock, could come from a book that was in vogue at about the time Trudeau was working as a schoolteacher, The Scientist in the Crib. To anyone who’s watched a toddler who was fascinated about dinosaurs grow into a teenager who couldn’t care less, Trudeau’s reverie makes sense as folk wisdom if not as a precise description of the scientific method.
There are also people who claim all babies are artists or musicians or mathematicians or … . Take your pick.
Wells goes on to highlight two female researchers (Trudeau being famously feminist and whose government just presented a budget boosting women) invited onstage to participate in the conversation (Note: Links have been removed),
… two young women researchers were invited onstage. Plainly their role was to be admired as pathbreaking young women researchers, pulverizing glass ceilings, embodying budget initiatives. To my relief, neither seemed interested in acting the part, or at least not in behaving as if sent straight from Central Casting.
Caitlin Miron from Queen’s University has already received some coverage for discovering a… thing… that could “switch off” cancer cells. This is how Miron was introduced. She could switch off cancer cells. It’s how Nye addressed her. You could switch off cancer cells! Miron answered, reasonably enough, that that’s how it might turn out someday, but that on the other hand it might not, and in the meantime she’s learning interesting new things about cancer cells. She was plainly flattered by the attention, but not interested in boiling her work down to slogans just yet.
Then the PM and the science guy turned to Ayda Elhage, who’s a PhD student in Chemistry at the University of Ottawa. Elhage, who was born in Lebanon, launched into a description of her work, which concentrates on (among other things) the tunable photocatalytic activity of palladium-decorated titanium dioxide [likely titanium dioxide nanoparticles]. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how important this work is! At least I hope I don’t, because I understood almost none of it! I think it’s about complex new materials whose properties can be triggered by light. Or not. Anyway, the way she resisted any attempt to reduce her work to a gimmick or gadget was heartening to hear.
Wells winds up with this,
… the truth is that even now, today, in the second of the dark Trump years, the United States is far more of a performer in science research than Canada is. The U.S. National Institutes of Health have about 6 or 7 times the per-capita budget of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; NASA and the National Science Foundation together spend about twice as much per capita as Canada’s Natural Science and Engineering Research Council.
The new investments in last week’s budget, while welcome, won’t change the orders of magnitude here. The U.S. commitment to science research is cultural and durable. The Trump White House’s call for cuts to granting agencies was met with budget increases to those agencies from Congress. Trudeau’s conversion to the cause comes after almost a year’s steady pressure from the Canadian research community. But I bet those researchers were heartened to hear Trudeau talking like one of them so soon after the budget came down.
Wells also covers their comments on support for fundamental research and a foray into the Kinder Morgan pipeline controversy.
Nye did not correctly identify the pipeline but he did comment on his visit to Fort McMurray. In any event, the Kinder Morgan portion of the discussion seemed scripted (to me), i.e, Trudeau knew the question was coming and was prepared for it. I’m guessing he also knew Nye was going to give him and his government a pass after hearing the reasons for their decision.
One question that I found interesting but not mentioned in Wells’ article was about language and the arts. It was neither Trudeau’s not Nye’s finest moment. They were clearly unable to shift gears, part of their problem being that much of what they discussed in terms of ‘baby scientists’ could also be said about the arts. Yes, all babies make art!
Final thoughts
As noted earlier, here’s a lot to applaud in the new budget, more support for fundamental research, catch up funding for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and greater support for women in the sciences and technology.
At the same time, I wish this government put more thought into how it’s spending taxpayers’ money.
For the curious, you can watch the entire (!) Trudeau/Nye conversation, 1 hour, 9 minutes and 30 seconds here.
For anyone interested in the Naylor report (or my comments on it), there’s this three-part series:
INVESTING IN CANADA’S FUTURE; Strengthening the Foundations of Canadian Research (Review of fundamental research final report): 1 of 3
INVESTING IN CANADA’S FUTURE; Strengthening the Foundations of Canadian Research (Review of fundamental research final report): 2 of 3
INVESTING IN CANADA’S FUTURE; Strengthening the Foundations of Canadian Research (Review of fundamental research final report): 3 of 3
For anyone who hasn’t been following the Canadian political scene, “sunny ways” is a term that Justin Trudeau uses to describe, in part, his political philosophy. Here’s an explanation of the term from the Liberal Party of Canada’s website,
Canadians have often heard Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speak of Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s [Canadian Prime Minister from 1896-1911] sunny ways – a guiding philosophy that both men share. Like Laurier, the Prime Minister knows that politics can be a positive and powerful force for change. …
Wilfrid Laurier’s appeal for the “sunny way” in political discourse has its roots in the Manitoba Schools Question. When Manitoba became a province in 1870, a dual school system was established to reflect the province’s Protestant and largely English-speaking population, and its Catholic and predominantly French-speaking, residents.
“The sun’s warm rays prove more effective than the wind’s bluster.”
By 1890, the Anglophone population widely outnumbered the Francophones. Seeking to appeal to this growing population, the provincial government of Thomas Greenway attempted to abolish the dual school system. With the support of the federal Conservative government, Manitoba’s Catholic community launched a court challenge of the school law. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ruled that while the law was valid, the federal government could restore public funding to denominational schools. In 1895, despite it being deeply divisive, Prime Minister Mackenzie Bowell introduced legislation to force Manitoba to restore Catholic schools – a measure that was then postponed due to severe opposition within his own cabinet, ultimately leading to his resignation.
In contrast to Bowell’s heavy-handed approach, Liberal Leader Wilfrid Laurier proposed that a diplomatic “sunny way” would work better, using as an illustration Aesop’s fable in which the sun and the wind hold a contest to see who can remove a traveler’s coat. The sun’s warm rays prove more effective than the wind’s bluster.
…
While more than 120 years have passed, Prime Minister Trudeau shares Laurier’s belief that the “sunny way” remains essential to solving the complex problems facing our country.
Trudeau seems to have had remarkable luck with his ‘sunny ways’ which sometimes seem more like a form of teflon coating than an approach to diplomacy as per Sir Wilfred Laurier. At other times, Trudeau appears to have a magic touch where diplomacy is concerned. He is famously able to deal with the volatile US President, Donald Trump.
This is the final commentary on the report titled,(INVESTING IN CANADA’S FUTURE; Strengthening the Foundations of Canadian Research). Part 1 of my commentary having provided some introductory material and first thoughts about the report, Part 2 offering more detailed thoughts; this part singles out ‘special cases’, sums up* my thoughts (circling back to ideas introduced in the first part), and offers link to other commentaries.
Special cases
Not all of the science funding in Canada is funneled through the four agencies designed for that purpose, (The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) are known collectively as the tri-council funding agencies and are focused on disbursement of research funds received from the federal government. The fourth ‘pillar’ agency, the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) is focused on funding for infrastructure and, technically speaking, is a 3rd party organization along with MITACS, CANARIE, the Perimeter Institute, and others.
In any event, there are also major research facilities and science initiatives which may receive direct funding from the federal government bypassing the funding agencies and, it would seem, peer review. For example, I featured this in my April 28, 2015 posting about the 2015 federal budget,
The $45 million announced for TRIUMF will support the laboratory’s role in accelerating science in Canada, an important investment in discovery research.
While the news about the CFI seems to have delighted a number of observers, it should be noted (as per Woodgett’s piece) that the $1.3B is to be paid out over six years ($220M per year, more or less) and the money won’t be disbursed until the 2017/18 fiscal year. As for the $45M designated for TRIUMF (Canada’s National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics), this is exciting news for the lab which seems to have bypassed the usual channels, as it has before, to receive its funding directly from the federal government. [emphases mine]
The Naylor report made this recommendation for Canada’s major research facilities, (MRF)
We heard from many who recommended that the federal government should manage its investments in “Big Science” in a more coordinated manner, with a cradle-to-grave perspective. The Panel agrees. Consistent with NACRI’s overall mandate, it should work closely with the CSA [Chief Science Advisor] in establishing a Standing Committee on Major Research Facilities (MRFs).
CFI defines a national research facility in the following way:
We define a national research facility as one that addresses the needs of a community of Canadian researchers representing a critical mass of users distributed across the country. This is done by providing shared access to substantial and advanced specialized equipment, services, resources, and scientific and technical personnel. The facility supports leading-edge research and technology development, and promotes the mobilization of knowledge and transfer of technology to society. A national research facility requires resource commitments well beyond the capacity of any one institution. A national research facility, whether single-sited, distributed or virtual, is specifically identified or recognized as serving pan-Canadian needs and its governance and management structures reflect this mandate.8
We accept this definition as appropriate for national research facilities to be considered by the Standing Committee on MRFs, but add that the committee should:
• define a capital investment or operating cost level above which such facilities are considered “major” and thus require oversight by this committee (e.g., defined so as to include the national MRFs proposed in Section 6.3: Compute Canada, Canadian Light Source, Canada’s National Design Network, Canadian Research Icebreaker Amundsen, International Vaccine Centre, Ocean Networks Canada, Ocean Tracking Network, and SNOLAB plus the TRIUMF facility); and
• consider international MRFs in which Canada has a significant role, such as astronomical telescopes of global significance.
The structure and function of this Special Standing Committee would closely track the proposal made in 2006 by former NSA [National Science Advisor] Dr Arthur Carty. We return to this topic in Chapter 6. For now, we observe that this approach would involve:
• a peer-reviewed decision on beginning an investment;
• a funded plan for the construction and operation of the facility, with continuing oversight by a peer specialist/agency review group for the specific facility;
• a plan for decommissioning; and
• a regular review scheduled to consider whether the facility still serves current needs.
We suggest that the committee have 10 members, with an eminent scientist as Chair. The members should include the CSA, two representatives from NACRI for liaison, and seven others. The other members should include Canadian and international scientists from a broad range of disciplines and experts on the construction, operation, and administration of MRFs. Consideration should be given to inviting the presidents of NRC [National Research Council of Canada] and CFI to serve as ex-officio members. The committee should be convened by the CSA, have access to the Secretariat associated with the CSA and NACRI, and report regularly to NACRI. (pp. 66-7 print; pp. 100-1 PDF)
I have the impression there’s been some ill feeling over the years regarding some of the major chunks of money given for ‘big science’. At a guess, direct appeals to a federal government that has no official mechanism for assessing the proposed ‘big science’ whether that means a major research facility (e.g., TRIUMF) or major science initiative (e.g., Pan Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy [keep reading to find out how I got the concept of a major science initiative wrong]) or 3rd party (MITACS) has seemed unfair to those who have to submit funding applications and go through vetting processes. This recommendation would seem to be an attempt to redress some of the issues.
Moving onto the third-party delivery and matching programs,
Three bodies in particular are the largest of these third-party organizations and illustrate the challenges of evaluating contribution agreements: Genome Canada, Mitacs, and Brain Canada. Genome Canada was created in 2000 at a time when many national genomics initiatives were being developed in the wake of the Human Genome Project. It emerged from a “bottom-up” design process driven by genomic scientists to complement existing programs by focusing on large-scale projects and technology platforms. Its funding model emphasized partnerships and matching funds to leverage federal commitments with the objective of rapidly ramping up genomics research in Canada.
This approach has been successful: Genome Canada has received $1.1 billion from the Government of Canada since its creation in 2000, and has raised over $1.6 billion through co-funding commitments, for a total investment in excess of $2.7 billion.34 The scale of Genome Canada’s funding programs allows it to support large-scale genomics research that the granting councils might otherwise not be able to fund. Genome Canada also supports a network of genomics technology and innovation centres with an emphasis on knowledge translation and has built domestic and international strategic partnerships. While its primary focus has been human health, it has also invested extensively in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, environment, and, more recently, oil and gas and mining— all with a view to the application and commercialization of genomic biotechnology.
Mitacs attracts, trains, and retains HQP [highly qualified personnel] in the Canadian research enterprise. Founded in 1999 as an NCE [Network Centre for Excellence], it was developed at a time when enrolments in graduate programs had flat-lined, and links between mathematics and industry were rare. Independent since 2011, Mitacs has focused on providing industrial research internships and postdoctoral fellowships, branching out beyond mathematics to all disciplines. It has leveraged funding effectively from the federal and provincial governments, industry, and not-for-profit organizations. It has also expanded internationally, providing two-way research mobility. Budget 2015 made Mitacs the single mechanism of federal support for postsecondary research internships with a total federal investment of $135.4 million over the next five years. This led to the wind-down of NSERC’s Industrial Postgraduate Scholarships Program. With matching from multiple other sources, Mitacs’ average annual budget is now $75 to $80 million. The organization aims to more than double the number of internships it funds to 10,000 per year by 2020.35
Finally, Brain Canada was created in 1998 (originally called NeuroScience Canada) to increase the scale of brain research funding in Canada and widen its scope with a view to encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration. In 2011 the federal government established the Canada Brain Research Fund to expand Brain Canada’s work, committing $100 million in new public investment for brain research to be matched 1:1 through contributions raised by Brain Canada. According to the STIC ‘State of the Nation’ 2014 report, Canada’s investment in neuroscience research is only about 40 per cent of that in the U.S. after adjusting for the size of the U.S. economy.36 Brain Canada may be filling a void left by declining success rates and flat funding at CIHR.
Recommendation and Elaboration
The Panel noted that, in general, third-party organizations for delivering research funding are particularly effective in leveraging funding from external partners. They fill important gaps in research funding and complement the work of the granting councils and CFI. At the same time, we questioned the overall efficiency of directing federal research funding through third-party organizations, noting that our consultations solicited mixed reactions. Some respondents favoured more overall funding concentrated in the agencies rather than diverting the funding to third-party entities. Others strongly supported the business models of these organizations.
We have indicated elsewhere that a system-wide review panel such as ours is not well-suited to examine these and other organizations subject to third-party agreements. We recommended instead in Chapter 4 that a new oversight body, NACRI, be created to provide expert advice and guidance on when a new entity might reasonably be supported by such an agreement. Here we make the case for enlisting NACRI in determining not just the desirability of initiating a new entity, but also whether contribution agreements should continue and, if so, on what terms.
The preceding sketches of three diverse organizations subject to contribution agreements help illustrate the rationale for this proposal. To underscore the challenges of adjudication, we elaborate briefly. Submissions highlighted that funding from Genome Canada has enabled fundamental discoveries to be made and important knowledge to be disseminated to the Canadian and international research communities. However, other experts suggested a bifurcation with CIHR or NSERC funding research-intensive development of novel technologies, while Genome Canada would focus on application (e.g., large-scale whole genome studies) and commercialization of existing technologies. From the Panel’s standpoint, these observations underscore the subtleties of determining where and how Genome Canada’s mandate overlaps and departs from that of CIHR and NSERC as well as CFI. Added to the complexity of any assessment is Genome Canada’s meaningful role in providing large-scale infrastructure grants and its commercialization program. Mitacs, even more than Genome Canada, bridges beyond academe to the private and non-profit sectors, again highlighting the advantage of having any review overseen by a body with representatives from both spheres. Finally, as did the other two entities, Brain Canada won plaudits, but some interchanges saw discussants ask when and whether it might be more efficient to flow this type of funding on a programmatic basis through CIHR.
We emphasize that the Panel’s intent here is neither to signal agreement nor disagreement with any of these submissions or discussions. We simply wish to highlight that decisions about ongoing funding will involve expert judgments informed by deep expertise in the relevant research areas and, in two of these examples, an ability to bridge from research to innovation and from extramural independent research to the private and non-profit sectors. Under current arrangements, management consulting firms and public servants drive the review and decision-making processes. Our position is that oversight by NACRI and stronger reliance on advice from content experts would be prudent given the sums involved and the nature of the issues. (pp. 102-4 print; pp. 136-8 PDF)
I wasn’t able to find anything other than this about major science initiatives (MSIs),
Big Science facilities, such as MSIs, have had particular challenges in securing ongoing stable operating support. Such facilities often have national or international missions. We termed them “major research facilities” (MRFs) xi in Chapter 4, and proposed an improved oversight mechanism that would provide lifecycle stewardship of these national science resources, starting with the decision to build them in the first instance. (p. 132 print; p. 166 PDF)
So, an MSI is an MRF? (head shaking) Why two terms for the same thing? And, how does the newly announced Pan Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy fit into the grand scheme of things?
The last ‘special case’ I’m featuring is the ‘Programme for Research Chairs for Excellent Scholars and Scientists’. Here’s what the report had to say about the state of affairs,
The major sources of federal funding for researcher salary support are the CRC [Canada Research Chair]and CERC [Canada Excellence Reseach Chair] programs. While some salary support is provided through council-specific programs, these investments have been declining over time. The Panel supports program simplification but, as noted in Chapter 5, we are concerned about the gaps created by the elimination of these personnel awards. While we focus here on the CRC and CERC programs because of their size, profile, and impact, our recommendations will reflect these concerns.
The CRC program was launched in 2000 and remains the Government of Canada’s flagship initiative to keep Canada among the world’s leading countries in higher education R&D. The program has created 2,000 research professorships across Canada with the stated aim “to attract and retain some of the world’s most accomplished and promising minds”5 as part of an effort to curtail the potential academic brain drain to the U.S. and elsewhere. The program is a tri-council initiative with most Chairs allocated to eligible institutions based on the national proportion of total research grant funding they receive from the three granting councils. The vast majority of Chairs are distributed based on area of research, of which 45 per cent align with NSERC, 35 per cent with CIHR, and 20 per cent with SSHRC; an additional special allocation of 120 Chairs can be used in the area of research chosen by the universities receiving the Chairs. There are two types of Chairs: Tier 1 Chairs are intended for outstanding researchers who are recognized as world leaders in their fields and are renewable; Tier 2 Chairs are targeted at exceptional emerging researchers with the potential to become leaders in their field and can be renewed once. Awards are paid directly to the universities and are valued at $200,000 annually for seven years (Tier 1) or $100,000 annually for five years (Tier 2). The program notes that Tier 2 Chairs are not meant to be a feeder group for Tier 1 Chairs; rather, universities are expected to develop a succession plan for their Tier 2 Chairs.
The CERC program was established in 2008 with the expressed aim of “support[ing] Canadian universities in their efforts to build on Canada’s growing reputation as a global leader in research and innovation.”6 The program aims to award world-renowned researchers and their teams with up to $10 million over seven years to establish ambitious research programs at Canadian universities, making these awards among the most prestigious and generous available internationally. There are currently 27 CERCs with funding available to support up to 30 Chairs, which are awarded in the priority areas established by the federal government. The awards, which are not renewable, require 1:1 matching funds from the host institution, and all degree-granting institutions that receive tri-council funding are eligible to compete. Both the CERC and CRC programs are open to Canadians and foreign citizens. However, until the most recent round, the CERCs have been constrained to the government’s STEM-related priorities; this has limited their availability to scholars and scientists from SSHRC-related disciplines. As well, even though Canadian-based researchers are eligible for CERC awards, the practice has clearly been to use them for international recruitment with every award to date going to researchers from abroad.
Similar to research training support, the funding for salary support to researchers and scholars is a significant proportion of total federal research investments, but relatively small with respect to the research ecosystem as a whole. There are more than 45,000 professors and teaching staff at Canada’s universities7 and a very small fraction hold these awards. Nevertheless, the programs can support research excellence by repatriating top Canadian talent from abroad and by recruiting and retaining top international talent in Canada.
The programs can also lead by example in promoting equity and diversity in the research enterprise. Unfortunately, both the CRC and CERC programs suffer from serious challenges regarding equity and diversity, as described in Chapter 5. Both programs have been criticized in particular for under-recruitment of women.
While the CERC program has recruited exclusively from outside Canada, the CRC program has shown declining performance in that regard. A 2016 evaluation of the CRC program8 observed that a rising number of chairholders were held by nominees who originated from within the host institution (57.5 per cent), and another 14.4 per cent had been recruited from other Canadian institutions. The Panel acknowledges that some of these awards may be important to retaining Canadian talent. However, we were also advised in our consultations that CRCs are being used with some frequency to offset salaries as part of regular faculty complement planning.
The evaluation further found that 28.1 per cent of current chairholders had been recruited from abroad, a decline from 32 per cent in the 2010 evaluation. That decline appears set to continue. The evaluation reported that “foreign nominees accounted, on average, for 13 per cent and 15 per cent respectively of new Tier 1 and Tier 2 nominees over the five-year period 2010 to 2014”, terming it a “large decrease” from 2005 to 2009 when the averages respectively were 32 per cent and 31 per cent. As well, between 2010-11 and 2014-15, the attrition rate for chairholders recruited from abroad was 75 per cent higher than for Canadian chairholders, indicating that the program is also falling short in its ability to retain international talent.9
One important factor here appears to be the value of the CRC awards. While they were generous in 2000, their value has remained unchanged for some 17 years, making it increasingly difficult to offer the level of support that world-leading research professors require. The diminishing real value of the awards also means that Chair positions are becoming less distinguishable from regular faculty positions, threatening the program’s relevance and effectiveness. To rejuvenate this program and make it relevant for recruitment and retention of top talent, it seems logical to take two steps:
• ask the granting councils and the Chairs Secretariat to work with universities in developing a plan to restore the effectiveness of these awards; and
• once that plan is approved, increase the award values by 35 per cent, thereby restoring the awards to their original value and making them internationally competitive once again.
In addition, the Panel observes that the original goal was for the program to fund 2,000 Chairs. Due to turnover and delays in filling Chair positions, approximately 10 to 15 per cent of them are unoccupied at any one time.i As a result, the program budget was reduced by $35 million in 2012. However, the occupancy rate has continued to decline since then, with an all-time low of only 1,612 Chair positions (80.6 per cent) filled as of December 2016. The Panel is dismayed by this inefficiency, especially at a time when Tier 2 Chairs remain one of the only external sources of salary support for ECRs [early career researchers]—a group that represents the future of Canadian research and scholarship. (pp. 142-4 print; pp. 176-8 PDF)
I think what you can see as a partial subtext in this report and which I’m attempting to highlight here in ‘special cases’ is a balancing act between supporting a broad range of research inquiries and focusing or pouring huge sums of money into ‘important’ research inquiries for high impact outcomes.
Final comments
There are many things to commend this report including the writing style. The notion that more coordination is needed amongst the various granting agencies, that greater recognition (i.e,, encouragement and funding opportunities) should be given to boundary-crossing research, and that we need to do more interprovincial collaboration is welcome. And yes, they want more money too. (That request is perfectly predictable. When was the last time a report suggested less funding?) Perhaps more tellingly, the request for money is buttressed with a plea to make it partisan-proof. In short, that funding doesn’t keep changing with the political tides.
One area that was not specifically mentioned, except when discussing prizes, was mathematics. I found that a bit surprising given how important the field of mathematics is to to virtually all the ‘sciences’. A 2013 report, Spotlight on Science, suggests there’s a problem(as noted my Oct. 9, 2013 posting about that report, (I also mention Canada’s PISA scores [Programme for International Student Assessment] by the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development], which consistently show Canadian students at the age of 15 [grade 10] do well) ,
… it appears that we have high drop out rates in the sciences and maths, from an Oct. 8, 2013 news item on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) website,
… Canadians are paying a heavy price for the fact that less than 50 per cent of Canadian high school students graduate with senior courses in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) at a time when 70 per cent of Canada’s top jobs require an education in those fields, said report released by the science education advocacy group Let’s Talk Science and the pharmaceutical company Amgen Canada.
Spotlight on Science Learning 2013 compiles publicly available information about individual and societal costs of students dropping out STEM courses early.
…
Even though most provinces only require math and science courses until Grade 10, the report [Spotlight on Science published by Let’s Talk Science and pharmaceutical company Amgen Canada) found students without Grade 12 math could expect to be excluded from 40 to 75 per cent of programs at Canadian universities, and students without Grade 11 could expect to be excluded from half of community college programs. [emphasis mine]
While I realize that education wasn’t the panel’s mandate they do reference the topic elsewhere and while secondary education is a provincial responsibility there is a direct relationship between it and postsecondary education.
On the lack of imagination front, there was some mention of our aging population but not much planning or discussion about integrating older researchers into the grand scheme of things. It’s all very well to talk about the aging population but shouldn’t we start introducing these ideas into more of our discussions on such topics as research rather than only those discussions focused on aging?
Continuing on with the lack of imagination and lack of forethought, I was not able to find any mention of independent scholars. The assumption, as always, is that one is affiliated with an institution. Given the ways in which our work world is changing with fewer jobs at the institutional level, it seems the panel was not focused on important and fra reaching trends. Also, there was no mention of technologies, such as artificial intelligence, that could affect basic research. One other thing from my wish list, which didn’t get mentioned, art/science or SciArt. Although that really would have been reaching.
Weirdly, one of the topics the panel did note, the pitiifull lack of interprovincial scientific collaboration, was completely ignored when it came time for recommendations.
Should you spot any errors in this commentary, please do drop me a comment.
Other responses to the report:
Nassif Ghoussoub (Piece of Mind blog; he’s a professor mathematics at the University of British Columbia; he attended one of the roundtable discussions held by the panel). As you might expect, he focuses on the money end of things in his May 1, 2017 posting.
You can find a series of essays about the report here under the title Response to Naylor Panel Report ** on the Canadian Science Policy Centre website.
There’s also this May 31, 2017 opinion piece by Jamie Cassels for The Vancouver Sun exhorting us to go forth collaborate internationally, presumably with added funding for the University of Victoria of which Cassels is the president and vice-chancellor. He seems not to have noticed that Canadian do much more poorly with interprovincial collaboration.
*ETA June 21, 2017: I’ve just stumbled across Ivan Semeniuk’s April 10, 2017 analysis (Globe and Mail newspaper) of the report. It’s substantive and well worth checking out.*
Again, here’s a link to the other parts:
INVESTING IN CANADA’S FUTURE; Strengthening the Foundations of Canadian Research (Review of fundamental research final report) Commentaries
The Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC) launched a lecture series on Monday, Jan. 16, 2017 with Sir Peter Gluckman as the first speaker in a talk titled, Science Advice in a Troubled World. From a Jan. 18, 2017 CSPC announcement (received via email),
The inaugural session of the Canadian Science Policy Lecture Series was hosted by ISSP [University of Ottawa’s Institute for Science Society and Policy (ISSP)] on Monday January 16th [2017] at the University of Ottawa. Sir Peter Gluckman, Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister of New Zealand gave a presentation titled “Science Advise [sic] in a troubled world”. For a summary of the event, video and pictures please visit the event page.
The session started with speeches by Monica Gattiner, Director, Institute for Science, Society and Policy, Jacques Frémont, President of the University of Ottawa as well as Mehrdad Hariri, CEO and President of the Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC).
The talk itself is about 50 mins. but there are lengthy introductions, including a rather unexpected (by me) reference to the recent US election from the president of the University of Ottawa, Jacques Frémont (formerly the head of Québec’s Human Rights Commission, where the talk was held. There was also a number of questions after the talk. So, the running time for the video 1 hr. 12 mins.
Sir Peter Gluckman ONZ FRS is the first Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister of New Zealand, having been appointed in 2009. He is also science envoy and advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He is chair of the International Network of Government Science Advice (INGSA), which operates under the aegis of the international Council of Science (ICSU). He chairs the APEC Chief Science Advisors and Equivalents group and is the coordinator of the secretariat of Small Advanced Economies Initiative. In 2016 he received the AAAS award in Science Diplomacy. He trained as a pediatric and biomedical scientist and holds a Distinguished University Professorship at the Liggins Institute of the University of Auckland. He has published over 700 scientific papers and several technical and popular science books. He has received the highest scientific (Rutherford medal) and civilian (Order of New Zealand, limited to 20 living persons) honours in NZ and numerous international scientific awards. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, a member of the National Academy of Medicine (USA) and a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (UK).
I listened to the entire video and Gluckman presented a thoughtful, nuanced lecture in which he also mentioned Calestous Juma and his 2016 book, Innovation and Its Enemies (btw, I will be writing a commentary about Juma’s extraordinary effort). He also referenced the concepts of post-truth and post-trust, and made an argument for viewing evidence-based science as part of the larger policymaking process rather than the dominant or only factor. From the Science Advice in a Troubled World event page,
Lecture Introduction
The world is facing many challenges from environmental degradation and climate change to global health issues, and many more. Societal relationships are changing; sources of information, reliable and otherwise, and their transmission are affecting the nature of public policy.
Within this context the question arises; how can scientific advice to governments help address these emerging issues in a more unstable and uncertain world?
The relationship between science and politics is complex and the challenges at their interface are growing. What does scientific advice mean within this context?
How can science better inform policy where decision making is increasingly made against a background of post-truth polemic?
I’m not in perfect agreement with Gluckman with regard to post-truth as I have been influenced by an essay of Steve Fuller’s suggesting that science too can be post-truth. (Fuller’s essay was highlighted in my Jan. 6, 2017 posting.)
Gluckman seems to be wielding a fair amount of influence on the Canadian scene. This is his second CSPC visit in the last few months. He was an invited speaker at the Eighth Annual CSPC conference in November 2016 and, while he’s here in Jan. 2017, he’s chairing the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) International Panel on Peer Review. (The CIHR is one of Canada’s three major government funding agencies for the sciences.)
Winston Churchill advised that “experts should be on tap but never on top”. In 2017, is a post-truth world a post-expert world? What does this mean for future debates on difficult policy issues? And what place can researchers usefully occupy in an academic landscape that emphasises policy impact but a political landscape that has become wary of experts? Join us for a lively discussion on academia and the provision of policy advice, examining the role of evidence and experts and exploring how gaps with the public and politicians might be bridged.
This event will be chaired by Achim Steiner, Director of the Oxford Martin School and former Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, with panellists including Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister of New Zealand and Chair of the International Network for Government Science Advice; Dr Gemma Harper, Deputy Director for Marine Policy and Evidence and Chief Social Scientist in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and Professor Stefan Dercon, Chief Economist of the Department for International Development (DFID) and Professor of Economic Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government.
This discussion will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome.
Here are the logistics should you be lucky enough to be able to attend (from the event page),
25 January 2017 17:00 – 18:15
Lecture Theatre, Oxford Martin School
34 Broad Street (corner of Holywell and Catte Streets)
Oxford
OX1 3BD