CFI seeking predictable funding as it rolls out initiatives under new strategic roadmap

Celebrating 15th anniversary

The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) won't be requesting new funding in the next federal Budget but will be seeking a commitment of predictable, sustainable funding in future years. CFI president and CEO Dr Gilles Patry says such a commitment would go a long way to providing clear, long-term direction for the research community when considering its medium- and long-term research infrastructure requirements.

CFI is currently implementing a new strategic roadmap that spells out its intentions for the next five years emphasizing greater research collaboration between academia and the private sector by broadening the range of activities it supports (R$, December 22/11).

"We're looking at predictable, annual sustainable funding for the CFI … an ongoing commitment from the government to support research infrastructure," says Patry. "There's been no written request to government yet but we're speaking with groups like PAGSE (Partnership Group for Science and Engineering), MPs and the public service."

CFI was created in 1997 as a five-year program but was enthusiastically received by the research community, prompting government to extend its funding. Now 15 years old, it has received $5 billion in federal funds to date, leveraging an additional $7 billion from the provinces, institutions and the private sector. In recent years, however, allocations from government have declined and the last two competitions for its flagship Leading Edge Fund and New Initiatives Fund were the smallest in CFI's history.

As a result, the percentage of money devoted to research infrastructure in relation to funding for the granting councils has declined from an average of 22% between 1997 and 2010 to an average of just 9% since then. The decline is partly due to increases in granting council funding, which more than tripled between 2000 to 2010 from $800 million in 2000 to $2.7 billion.

Patry acknowledges that the infrastructure portion of public research funding is not optimum. He says that, based on what other countries are doing, a more realistic allocation would be 14-15% or about $400 million a year.

CFI also announced more details on how it intends to spend the $500 million it received in the 2012 Budget. The Leading Edge Fund and New Initiative Fund will receive $320 million to launch a new competition (including the 30% Infrastructure Operating Fund). The Leaders Opportunity Fund will receive $125 million (a 30% reduction from current funding levels), while the College-Industry Innovation Fund has been allocated $25 million.

The remaining $25 million will go towards various collaborative ventures with the granting councils. This includes funding in support of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research, a digital scholarship initiative coalescing at the tri-Council level and the Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research.

The CFI is also awaiting ministerial availability to announce the remaining three projects under its Major Science Initiatives (MSI) program. The CFI allocated $185 for a competition which yielded four winners and approved by the CFI board of governors. To date it has been announced that Univ of Victoria-based Ocean Networks Canada — operators of the VENUS coastal network and the Neptune Canada regional network — were awarded $32.8 million.

RESEARCH MONEY has learned that the other projects are: Canadian Light Source (Univ of Saskatchewan), SNOLAB (Carleton Univ and Queen's Univ) and a consortium of high performance computing centres. The latter has been allocated $50 million but the award was made conditionally. The CFI requested that Compute Canada — the consortium responsible for HPC — reorganize itself before its award is finalized (R$, April 17/12).

The MSI competition was held to provide major science facilities with a stable source of operational funding through a single source. It also reflects CFI's growing role in operational funding. Of the $600 million the government allocated to CFI in the 2009 Budget, it's estimated that 47% flowed to operations. That percentage is expected to grow in the years ahead.

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