Granting councils target NCE program for bulk of Budget-mandated spending reductions

The Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCEs), mid-career researchers, equipment grants and support for post doctoral fellows are shaping up as the main casualties as the granting councils cut back on spending while attempting to preserve funding for basic research. The news was delivered to the research community at an April 13th meeting between university VPs research and the presidents of the granting councils and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

The latest federal Budget provided the granting councils $37 million "to enhance ... support for industry-academic research partnership initiatives". At the same time, however, they were slapped with a $37-million reduction which is largely being found by reducing flow-through funding to the NCE program, resulting in a budget cut as high as 28% - a percentage the NCE tells RE$EARCH MONEY could ultimately be much lower as the final funding amounts "are still not confirmed by central agencies".

That will result in much a smaller number of networks under the traditional NCE and Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR) programs. The NCE program is a Tri-Council initiative of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

"It's pretty substantive. There will be a big cut to that program a year from now ... to existing NCEs and more than half the CECRs," says Dr John Hepburn, VP research and international at the Univ of British Columbia. "The flow-through cuts from the granting councils are not equal amounts. NSERC recommended smaller cuts to the NCE than SSHRC or CIHR."

While the reduction in NCE funding is worrisome, there is no indication that the government has lost confidence in the program. Rather, cuts to the program appear to be viewed as the least damaging way to achieve the budget cuts required by government without impacting the broad research community.

"The next phase of the NCE program will have its challenges," says Jean-Claude Gavrel, the former head of the NCE secretariat. "The CECR program has 22 networks now and that will decrease to 10. It's quite a drop but not that different from the success rates of the traditional NCE. The traditional NCEs are where we will see the bulk of the cuts. (The program) grew in 2005 with more funding but it will now thrive in a reduced mode."

While the granting councils have preserved their funding envelopes for basic research student scholarships and industry-related research initiatives - as specified in Budget documents - funding for basic research has been stagnant for the past several years, eroding the ability of universities to support the talent they have worked hard to attract.

Particularly vulnerable are promising mid-career researchers who still have time to be recruited through a rich assortment of research chairs but are constrained by the limited amount of funding available for basic research proposals. Several European countries have recently increased funding for basic research despite fiscal pressures of their own and are actively scouring the globe for fresh talent.

"We're now starting to lose talented mid-career researchers to the EU. The EU Framework program, France and Germany are all increasing their basic research envelope. Germany is increasing funding for basic research by 5%," says Hepburn. "These are huge increases in funding. They (European countries) can do targeted recruitment and they are making spectacular offers. That's my main concern. Canada has built a very strong university research community and I don't want to see it taken apart by foreign competition."

Dr Lorne Babiuk, VP research at the Univ of Alberta, shares Hepburn's concern, saying a balance must be achieved between support for fundamental research and more strategically-positioned funding that encourages university-industry collaboration.

"I'm a firm believer in balance. If you go all directed funding there will be nothing to apply. We're getting close to where we won't have a pipeline to fill," says Babiuk. "The real concern is the front end cadre of researchers. If we spend more than 20 years training researchers to get their first grant but not a second grant, that's a waste."

In a similar vein, Babiuk is also concerned with the results of the latest NSERC competition for post doctoral fellowships (see chart below). He calls the success rate of of 9.3% in the 2011 competition "abysmal" and contends that the lack of support at such a crucial stage of a researcher's career underlines an emerging retention problem throughout academia.

"If we train researchers with NSERC funding and they're really successful and there's no support until they become professors. It's serious," he says. "There's no money to demonstrate ability."

Retention concerns are front and centre with regard to NSERC's decision to eliminate two programs related to equipment and access to international facilities. The demise of the Research Tools and Instrumentation (RTI) program and the Major Facilities Access (MRS) program will hinder a researcher's ability to purchase small amounts of equipment or purchase access to external research facilities. Hopes that CFI might pick up the slack for RTI were dashed when CFI president Dr Gilles Patry told researchers his organization wasn't interested in starting a program for relatively small expenditures.

"It's not devastating but it will have an impact," says Hepburn. "The CFI has either no interest or no capacity."

Despite concern over the granting council cuts, both Hepburn and Babiuk says they're grateful that the councils were spared cuts suffered by other areas of government- funded research. It's a sentiment shared by Dr Digvas Jayas, VP research and international at the Univ of Manitoba. Jayas says the maintenance of funding at the granting councils combined with new targeted funding is a good indication of the government's support for basic research.

"Targeted funding can still be very basic research. Good examples are the resource sector or the oil sands," says Jayas. "It seems like the NCE program is the main recipient of the reductions."

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