Government tags AAFC and NRCan labs for transfer to university sector

Two of five candidates to move forward

The federal government will move forward on only two of the five federal laboratories identified by an Expert Panel as early candidates for collaboration with a range of academic, institutional and industry partners. The government response was announced with little explanation as to why the other three candidates were not being considered, although there is speculation that many of the government departments targeted for transfer opposed their inclusion since the proposals came from sources external to government.

The two federal labs that will be considered for partnering with external organizations are the Geosciences Laboratories at Natural Resources Canada and the Cereal Research and Innovation Laboratory at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (see page 2 for full early candidate list). The government says it will only proceed with proposals in which all partners involved are interested in pursuing integration with outside partners.

The proposal involving the National Research Council's Aerospace Manufacturing Technology Centre was not generated by the NRC. Nor was the NRC consulted before the proposal was submitted.

"The NRC has not been involved in any of the proposals in this program," says NRC president Dr Pierre Coulombe. "The government decided on two two initiatives and for the rest of it, it's business as usual ... We'll continue to explore partnerships with all partners that can contribute to the goals we are trying to achieve."

Another early candidate — Environment Canada's Burlington ON-based Wastewater Technology Centre — has already been the focus of a disastrous privatization attempt in the early 1990s. The laboratory operated as a government-owned, company-operated (GoCo) until 1999 when it imploded and has never really recovered from the experience.

The early candidates were selected from a slate of 56 proposals solicited by the Independent Panel of Experts chaired by Dr Arnold Naimark, drawing a considerable response primarily from the university community who saw it as an opportunity to strengthen areas of research where they already held considerable expertise.

"To say that this (the panel call for proposals) triggered great interest in the universities is an understatement," says Dr Tom Brzustowski, RBC Financial Group professor in the Commercialization of Innovation at the Univ of Ottawa. "The university presidents saw this thing as a great helicopter swooping down on the NRC campus and when Pierre (Coulombe) is looking another way, picking up one of his institutes, taking it over to the Bank of Canada, loading it with money and dropping it on their campus. That's not going to happen."

The decision to appoint an Expert Panel was announced in the 2007 federal Budget and struck by Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) in August/07. The final report was submitted by the end of the year and has been with TBS ever since. Its June 5th release coincided with the deadline of an access-to-information (ATI) request by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), the public sector union representing federal S&T personnel. An ATI request has also been submitted for the release of the full list of proposals received by the Panel.

The apparent reluctance of government to pursue all five candidates indicates the sensitivity surrounding the issue of transferring federal assets into the academic or private sectors and the low priority the Conservative administration places on the issue as it struggles to increase its minority status and grapple with higher-profile issues.

For the university community and some departmental labs, however, the government's willingness consider transferring federal, non-regulatory laboratories was seen as an important opportunity to bolster collaboration and help revive and expand federal S&T after years of benign neglect.

The initiative — which has yet to be formally approved or funded by the federal government — was conceived to break down barriers and boost Canada's research capacity in areas of global competitive strength.

Teaming with universities would allow government scientists access to competitive funding such as the granting councils and the Canada Foundation for Innovation which only funds projects where a university is the lead applicant. From the academic side, collaboration would give university researchers and students access to new sources of knowledge and expertise, while industry would benefit primarily from an increase in the volume of highly skilled personnel.

Yet a survey conducted by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada while the Panel was beginning its work shows there is already extensive collaboration between federal labs and universities.

"AUCC discovered that 78 federal research facilities involving over 3,000 employees and 1,200 scientists and hundreds of grad students already were in intensive, intimate collaboration," says Brzustowski. "Scientists are very clever people and can find ways to collaborate within existing structures if the effort seems worthwhile for the science." They're very good at doing this."

The panel also recommends the establishment of a central agency or "central locus of authority" to handle the new arrangements. Further, a general plan is also called for to evaluate the new entities and provide guidance on data requirements for determining outputs and outcomes.

Coulombe questions the necessity of adding another layer of bureaucracy when collaboration is already occurring between federal researchers and their academic and private sector counterparts.

"Partnerships is something that we (NRC) do. Do we need now to create an umbrella to oversee those partnerships? I'm not sure it's adding a lot of value, creating layers and layers," he says.

The report says current methods of inter-sectoral collaboration do not produce an optimal level of S&T integration. Rather than recommending a specific model or models for governing and managing collaborations, however, the panel concludes that there is "a feature of models of close integration that is required, in the current Canadian context, to achieve the full scope of the four objectives of the Government's transfer strategy". These are listed as increased value/efficiency, enhanced quality of scientific activities, expanded opportunities for learning and knowledge transfer and improved economic competitiveness.

"We identified a critical element. The model must contain a mechanism and governance structure so workers work under a common research plan and management structure. It must contain a common commitment and way of identifying common research goals," says Naimark, president emeritus and dean of medicine emeritus, Univ of Manitoba. "It could be a range of models but they need that core."

The panel also found that terminology included in its mandate such as "transfer" and "non-regulatory" were problematic as they limited the scope of opportunities for collaboration. In their place, the panel created the term Inter-Sectoral S&T Integration (ISTI) as best reflecting its mission.

Collaboration could theoretically eliminate the impasse between the federal S&T community and the government's central agencies, which have routinely rejected proposals such as the Federal Innovation Networks of Excellence (FINE) initiative (R$, June 23/03). Brzustowski and others have called for an integrated system of publicly funded research (R$, January 24/05).

"There's interest from all three sectors for integration where it makes sense. The term early candidate was taken to mean that criteria had been met and also that candidates had undertaken discussions and interaction to be up and running in 12 months," says Naimark. "The long-term strategy is to identify key sectors and mobilize resources to tackle key challenges and optimize efforts. Integration is seen as a component of that because it contributes to the strategic goals which include getting a high-quality, broad result from investments."

The Expert Panel report does not comment directly on the need for infrastructure renewal but Naimark says that for ISTI to work, resources are going to figure prominently in the equation.

"If you want to move more expeditiously, there has to be more, additional investment or a re-direction of resources," he says. "How are the scientists going to be working? The renewal process strategy is to re-invest new hiring into these new collaborative partnerships."

Another area which the report only mentions obliquely is the issue of employment. The issue is buried deep within the report and referred to as "unnecessary constraints". Naimark says the term refers to "constraints in how freely labs can organize their affairs and collaborate, including limitations on what researchers can or cannot do in the areas of intellectual property and trips to conferences."

"We found encouraging evidence that people are working around these issues – different employment rules and regulations," he says. "It will take a long time but it can be done, streamlining and building on experience and creating templates. It's desirable to aggregate experience in a forward-looking way and cut time down to a few months.. There needs to be a central agency in government that oversees and facilitates this and becomes a vehicle for this learning and creating tools."

R$