Gault leaves enduring statistical legacy

Canada's success in achieving leadership in science, technology and innovation (STI) statistics is largely due to the tenacity of Dr Fred Gault, who retired this week after a 24-year career at Statistics Canada. Since joining the agency in 1984, Gault has overseen the development of a powerful set of STI indicators that has put Canada on the map internationally and helped to establish a small but influential group of researchers examining the complexities of innovation as a local and regional phenomenon.

Garnering support for STI data gathering has never been a top priority of government, yet Gault has succeeded in drawing financial support from a wide range of governments, departments and agencies to fund a growing range of STI-related surveys. One of his most significant achievements was to build up the STI division after brutal budget cuts under the government of Brian Mulroney.

"The cuts took a very broad sword to the budget of Statistics Canada and virtually eliminated the entire S&T budget," says Dr David Wolfe, co-director of the Univ of Toronto's program on globalization and regional innovation systems. "By sheer force of will he scraped together enough money to keep the division going. He created the S&T Advisory Committee which led to a broad conceptual framework. Fred was also doing this kind of work at the OECD and has been a hugely influential force at that level."

Dr Stephen Fienberg headed up the S&T Advisory Committee at StatsCan and he concurs that Gault was instrumental in laying the foundations for today's powerful set of STI indicators.

"Fred was engaged from top to bottom. If it wasn't for him it would not have worked," says Fienberg, a professor of statistics and social science at Carnegie Mellon Univ in Pittsburgh. "The innovation survey was mimicked by everyone and that was just a piece of it. It had to fit with a process model of inputs and outputs."

"Fred has taken STI indicators from strength to strength and elevated S&T statistics in terms of importance at Statistics Canada," says Adam Holbrook, an associate director of Simon Fraser Univ's Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology (CPROST) and a colleague of Gault's since the 1980s. "As a middle country punching above its weight, Gault's work is important to many countries. And it's spilled over into the academic world."

In the academic realm, Gault was instrumental in bringing together most of Canada's statistical STI researchers into what became known as the Innovation Systems Research Network (ISRN). Prior to a workshop in 1997, the researchers had rarely interacted, but with the urging of Gault and the late Dr John de la Mothe they went on to form the Network and were successful in securing funding through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Network.

ISRN has branched into the study of local and regional innovation systems and Wolfe says Gault has been a key ally.

"There's been an important intellectual and methodological tension between us and him. To his credit, he never shut us out. In fact, he built in a regional dimension to the work he did," says Wolfe.

Despite Gault's success in securing adequate funding to support STI indicator work, his division's budget is once again under siege. Holbrook says the drop in StatsCan's budget could cause long-lasting damage.

"What is under attack is Statistics Canada's ability to be on the cutting edge of supporting innovation and research," he says. "Treasury Board needs to provide funding but it's not prepared to do it."

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