The federal and provincial governments have been underfunding universities for decades. Recently, universities were able to start recruiting foreign students to make up for the shortfall, but it looks like that money tap will be turned down. It doesn’t look like there’s a plan to make up for it.
At the same time, the feds want to
recruit more than 1,000 top international researchers to Canada, with the budget injecting up to $1.7-billion into a suite of recruitment measures.
That’ll be tough if universities see their income crater.
As clearly this thread has no clue what goes on at universities, or even knows the difference between universities and colleges, I’ll explain the OPs point.
$1.7B for 1000 scientist is $1.7M each, for 5 years in total. For senior scientists, this covers salary. But now we have 1000 extra grant applications in a system that is funded at 20% the level of the US per capita. This means we will try and recruit Americans, but tell them they will have an under 10% chance of getting any grant money, and that grant size is half a typical NIH or NSF grant. Large projects? Zero. This research has to be done somewhere, which costs universities money. The same universities getting squeezed by frozen tuitions the last 6 years.
So it is a designed bullshit line item. No one will access this because by the time it rolls out to real funds, the US will have reverted funding and going back to trouncing this banana republic. Excellence, why would an established scientists move to a poorly funded system? They will get more done of they just ride the storm in US.
This money goes to cancer and disease research, like lipid nanoparticles that saved millions of lives with COVID vaccines (yes, that came from Canada), or neural network algorithms driving trillions in investment, also from Canada, but we just pissed away that IP to the US for a handful of shiny rocks.
If Carney is serious about CDN productivity, he needs to fund R&D at per capita levels closer to US or China and make sure the result of this research is developed in Canada, not just sold off cheap to the US as per the last 60 years. A decent economist would realize there is tremendous potential return on investment, far higher than subsidies for pickup truck production to US corporations, and certainly more than the 100-150x more we waste on military spending which does nothing for the CDN economy.
This does not affect colleges. They don’t do research and are for vocational training.
Thanks.