Ignatieff fulfills commitment to raise funding of science agencies in House

Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has made good on his commitment to raise the research community concerns over funding of the granting councils and other S&T programs in the House of Commons. On April 21, Ignatieff lambasted the Conservative government for its strategic review-related $148 million in cuts to the budgets of the granting councils and lack of long-term funding for Genome Canada.

In three sequential questions for Industry minister Tony Clement, Ignatieff accused the government of having "little confidence in Canada's scientific community" and asked "why is this government starving our scientists?"

Clement responded by referring to the government's $5.1-billion increase in S&T funding in the 2009 Budget (see chart) and asserted that it had made a multi-year commitment "of hundreds of millions of dollars" to Genome Canada.

Ignatieff made his commitment to raise S&T in Parliament in his response to a group of scientists who wrote a March 16th open letter to the prime minister and leader of the opposition. The letter – signed by more than 2,000 scientists – calls for increases to the granting council budgets commensurate with those being made in the US by the Obama administration and called for the government to include "top research scientists and humanists" in discussions for determining the future direction of research funding.

The coalition of scientists – which has established a web site to garner support and communicate its positions on S&T – also called for eliminating the need for matching funds for the new Research Infrastructure Program and Canada Foundation for Innovation funding, and expressed regret over the directed nature of the $17.5 million the recent Budget allocated to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

More recently, the web site has been utilized to air grievances over the results of the recent NSERC Discovery Grants Program competition, particularly those from the mathematics research community which saw its success rate tumble from 77% in 2008 to 64% in 2008 while the mean grant size increased just 4.6% to $20,200.

The coalition's web site is www.dontleavecanadabehind.wordpress.com

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