Canada Research Chairs program considers enhanced role as national strategic resource

Several modifications on the table

Canada Research Chairs (CRC) administrators are weighing options to enhance the program's role as a national strategic resource. Buoyed by the program's success to date, the CRC steering committee is considering a number of modifications prompted in part from recommendations delivered last year by a report on its first five years of operation (see chart). If accepted, the changes could see the CRC's strategic role bolstered along with a corresponding increase to its $300-million annual budget.

Launched in 2000, the CRC program will be fully allocated next year. To date, nearly 1,700 chairs out of a total of 2,000 have been filled, with the most recent cycle of approximately 100 awaiting official announcement. Of the 1,577 chairs officially announced, 532 or 32% have been recruited from outside Canada, including 266 international recruits and 235 expatriates. The number of female chair holders remains stubbornly low at 331 (21%).

CRC executive director, Dr John ApSimon, says that a new government and the program's pending maturity, offers an opportunity to discuss modifications or enhancements to increase knowledge capacity and its contribution to Canada's innovation agenda.

"Is it time to start thinking about another dimension (such as) a slightly different form of competition addressing national strategic priorities," says ApSimon. "That's one area that we should start talking about as a possibility ... We could create some more chairs perhaps. These discussions have not gone very far because the old government stopped thinking and working for a while and a new one just came in."

ApSimon has been providing names of CRC chairholders on an ad hoc basis to organizations that require expert advice in specific areas of S&T. For instance, names of chair holders in nanotechnology were provided to the Office of the National Science Advisor for its nanotech consultations. ApSimon has also been meeting with provincial officials to encourage the use of chair holders to assist in areas of economic and social priority.

"The policy intent is to make these people more than just employees of the universities and in fact expand research capacity in this country - not just in their own labs but by being a strategic resource for the country," he says. "That's my strategy now for convincing the powers that be that these are more than just professors ... We've got 2,000 of the best people in the world. Surely a large number of them could be used for these kinds of purposes."

Another area being considered for change is the funding level of Tier II chairs ($500,000 over five years for promising new researchers) which has been identified by the fifth-year evaluation as inadequate. Since the CRC was launched, several other countries have followed suit with similar programs - many directly modelled on the Canadian version - leading the fifth-year review committee to question the program's ability to continue attracting highly skilled foreign talent.

It's unclear whether CRC's competitive edge is being challenged. The largest number of international researchers is recruited from the US, which doesn't have an equivalent program. And those that have copied the program are not major recruitment sources. Still, the size of Tier II grants could become an issue in the future. The CRC steering committee's response to the review recommendation says discussions with universities should be renewed to ensure that financial compensation packages are competitive. It also urges universities to increase their mentoring of chair holders in the grant application process.

TACKLING GENDER DISTRIBUTION

A more troublesome issue that has dogged the CRC since the beginning is the relatively small number of women chair holders. The woefully low percentages of the early competitions have given way to higher levels of female representation, as universities become more proactive in their recruitment. In 2003 and 2004, competitions yielded results in which more than 30% of the new awards were women. But the percentage of women chair holders in the latest competition dropped to 21%, in line with the overall program average.

To combat the trend, the CRC recently started requiring universities to establish gender targets and tasked the CRC secretariat to monitor compliance. The response came with a strongly worded statement that threatened moratoria on new nominations and removal of chair allocations. But ApSimon says it would be extremely difficult to determine cases where punitive action is warranted.

"Originally we said we could use sanctions (but) what is a true timeframe for attaining a target? Most chairs are already awarded," he says. "Basically we keep the moral suasion going. We keep requiring universities to tell us what they are doing. Some universities have been quite enlightened in defining their targets."

To date, 69 of 73 eligible institutions have filed their targets with the CRC secretariat, with the typical target at about 25%.

"In many disciplines, especially NSERC disciplines, there are fewer women scholars than in SSHRC disciplines," says ApSimon. "But look at women in graduate school now. Women dominate in some of the traditional male areas, so that's going to trickle through eventually. A five-year assessment is not really long enough."

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