Peter Calamai

Tory vision for S&T uninformed by reality

By Peter Calamai

Anyone who has followed Canadian science policy in recent years will recognize the phrase Science and Technology for the New Century. That was the overblown title of the last federal government review of science and technology published 10 years ago. Those with even longer memories should recognize Science: The Endless Frontier. That was the much more memorable title of the US report by Vannevar Bush in 1945 which effectively defined society's social contract with science over the past half-century.

Judging from the inchoate approach to S&T in last month's Economic and Fiscal Update, the Conservative Cabinet intends to pay little heed to either document. Of course, it's also possible that the minds behind the update don't recognize the 1996 report as official federal policy (it is) and think that "the endless frontier" originated with television's Star Trek.

This judgment is based on an admittedly tea-leaves reading of the sparse allusions to S&T in a document issued at the same time as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's update. That 92-page booklet is entitled Advantage Canada: Building a Strong Economy for Canadians, proving yet again that our government officials suffer a panache deficit where titles are concerned.

The framing for the S&T section is that Canada must create the best educated, most skilled and most flexible workforce in the world. This is rich indeed, coming from a government which has just slashed the already inadequate federal funding for helping the 48% of adult Canadians whose reading, writing or numeracy skills fall below the levels necessary for full participation in the modern economy.

What then to make of the document's pledge to pursue a so-called Knowledge Advantage? Do the drafters of Advantage Canada think Statistics Canada got its repeated literacy assessments completely wrong? Or do they intend to cream the best of the population and shoot the rest? It's difficult to understand how Canada can hope to play in the same league as its economic competitors when half the population isn't being suited up for the game.

The document also pledges to "help to better align Canada's post-secondary research capacity with the needs of business." Like the obligatory promises to cut red tape, this pledge is ritualistic for new governments. Unfortunately, the Conservatives appear to actually believe that apparatchiks can pick the "winners" to be backed with research funding. This is just one indication that government strategists either haven't read Vannevar Bush's report, or don't understand it. From Britain's Tony Benn to Canada's Brian Mulroney, politicians continually talk about aligning university labs more closely with entrepreneurs, and consistently fail in the attempt.

Entrepreneurs like RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis have publicly opposed the commercialization of university research, contending that its true value lies in sharpening young intellects that will generate prosperity once they join the corporate world. Yet the bureaucrats behind Advantage Canada think they know better than the man who made the BlackBerry a global brand.

The misconceptions of the government's nascent approach to S&T don't end there. The Update unveils a chimera called "primary scientific research," which is undefined. Observers suspect it will come to mean exactly what the Harper government wants it to mean (as with the word Quebeçois).

Even more worrying is the idea of "transferring the management of some non-regulatory federal laboratories to universities." This appears to go far beyond the current co-location of national labs on campuses like Memorial, Carleton and UBC, or even the shared responsibility for the National Institute for Nanotechnology between NRC and the University of Alberta. Is it possible that no one in Finance Canada has heard of the hash the University of California has made of operating Los Alamos National Laboratories — an unnecessary shut-down which cost US $120 million, security lapses and a revolving door for the top boss.

The university community faced a conundrum in reacting to Advantage Canada. Unlike the previous Liberal governments which actively courted the universities, the Conservative Cabinet has kept them at arm's length. Industry minister Maxime Bernier didn't show up for a meeting to discuss funding with the G-13 research-intensive universities in Edmonton this summer or for last week's announcement in Waterloo of the final big grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).

Not surprisingly, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada choose to view the Conservative S&T policy as a half-full glass. Its Nov. 23 statement gave no hint of the seething anger among the social sciences and humanities community over the government's uncritical endorsement of energy, environmental technologies and health sciences as national research priorities. These were the same areas spotlighted by a report from the Council of Canadian Academies, whose methodology has itself been savaged by social scientists.

One of the few S&T organizations that wasn't lickspittle in its comments was the Canadian Association of Physicists. An analysis circulated to CAP members pointed out that undertakings of interest to physicists would be at a disadvantage if the Conservatives pushed ahead with their goal to have private sector funding partners for "large-scale, national scientific projects."

The research community can take some solace from the Harper government's commitment to continue investing in scientific equipment and infrastructure to keep Canadian universities competitive. That sounds a lot as if the CFI will continue, but perhaps rebranded like "Canada's New Government." Ditto for the Networks of Centres of Excellence, although an NCE-appointed committee is currently quietly examining the appropriateness of the networks' niche fit.

The three federal granting councils are already on edge over value-for-money audits which have been submitted but not yet released. They must now also be anxiously parsing the government's pledge to keep "the rate of program spending, on average, below the rate of growth in the economy."

The kicker is that there will almost certainly be a federal election before any of the Advantage Canada changes take effect. Maybe before then Stephen Harper will actually say something substantive about how science matters to the country.

Peter Calamai is national science writer for the Toronto Star. In 1987, he directed Canada's first literacy survey.