Feds provide CFI with long term stability with $750 million in year-end cash

The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) program has been extended to 2010 with a new contribution of $750 million in year-end federal funding. The unusual step of adding to the CFI war chest comes just five months after the government added $500 million to its accounts and years before the new funding will be required, eliciting charges from some quarters that the Liberals are acting irresponsibly by dumping surplus money on the eve of a possible recession. The cash infusion brings the total investment by the Liberal administration to $3.15 billion since the arm's length agency was created in 1997.

The pitch for the latest CFI investment is being explicitly tied to the government's objectives of doubling its R&D spending by the end of the decade and moving Canada into the top five of industrialized nations in terms of R&D spending as a percentage of gross domestic product. Those goals were unveiled last fall in the Speech from the Throne (and Jean Chrétien's official response), and have been hammered home in speech after speech by senior ministers and the Prime Minister himself.

The announcement also came with assurances from Industry minister Brian Tobin that the government is ready to act upon other cash-strapped elements of university-based research - most likely the granting councils and support for the indirect costs of federally-funded research. "There is no question that we need to address and we will be addressing - I can't say more today - some of the other funding agencies and strains that are out there," said Tobin during the March 6 announcement at the Univ of Ottawa. "There is going to be money available for a large variety of funding agencies."

The new CFI investment is unlikely to increase the level at which the organization currently funds research infrastructure projects, and it doesn't come with an expanded mandate. By moving the funds into CFI accounts, it will likely grow with interest to nearly $1 billion by the time it will be needed for competitions between 2006 and 2010. With the contributions of other funding partners (CFI funds only 40% of any approved projects), the new money will fund an additional $2.5 billion in research infrastructure projects.

"There won't be an acceleration in the rate of funding. We won't try to push the schedule," says CFI president/CEO Dr David Strangway. "This piece of the OECD objective to be in the top five (R&D spending nations) is protected. This puts it into the accounts."

Strangway agrees that CFI represents only one component of university research funding and while welcome, actually increases pressure on the granting councils and the universities which incur overhead and indirect costs for every CFI-approved project. But he points out that the long-term commitment being demonstrated by the federal government provides a measures of support and stability unavailable to previous generations of Canadian researchers.

"Indirect costs and the granting councils are fundamental issues (and) I hope all dimensions (of university research funding) are addressed in the next year or two," says Strangway, who previously had hands-on experience with both as president of the Univ of British Columbia. "We also have a massive turnover coming through and those researchers never got this type of support to be fully competitive in the global sense. The opportunity is to capitalize on a new generation of researchers and give them the tools we didn't have."

The continuation of the CFI program until 2010 compels the provinces to continue pumping money into the matching funds they have established, to ensure that their universities have equal access to federal research infrastructure support. To date, the provinces have collectively pumped billions into those funds, with the largest being the Ontario Innovation Trust, Valorisation-Recherche Québec, Alberta's Innovation Science Research Investment Program and the BC Knowledge Development Fund.

In spite of the CFI's involvement in the education system of the provinces - a highly sensitive federal-provincial issue - there's no indication that the provinces strongly object to the arrangement. When making the announcement of the new funding, however, Tobin praised past participation in the program by the provinces, universities and other funding partners and called for their continued support.

"I want to...issue an invitation today to take up the challenge as they have done in the past with the federal government...to make Canada the most innovative country in the world," he said. "In issuing that challenge and anticipating a positive response, I want to say thank you to all of our funding partners.

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