Universities call for commitment to research funding

Canada’s centres of higher education are calling on the federal government and private sector to continue to spend on research and development even during the current economic uncertainty, to avoid falling behind the rest of the world.

In a report published this week entitled Momentum, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada said Canada spent $29 billion on research and development last year, an increase of 93 per cent from 1992. The country would have to increase research and development spending to $70 billion by 2015 in order to keep up with other nations, the report said.

The Conservative government issued a science policy paper in 2007 outlining its strategy to focus on gaining a competitive advantage in four areas: the environment, medicine, information technologies and natural resources and energy. One thing it did not do, the report said, was tie research funding to gross domestic product (GDP) to measure research intensity, as other nations have done.

The report estimates that Canada would need to aspire to spend a minimum of three per cent of GDP on gross expenditures on research and development (GERD) to be among the world leaders in research.

“The competition to rank among world leaders in R&D investments and, by extension, R&D returns, is thus fierce,” the report said.

Michelle Gauthier, the main author of the report, said the $70-billion goal is an ambitious target and one that might not be pursued given the current economic climate, but she said it serves as a reminder as to how competition in research and development is growing.

“It really gives a sense of the scope of the challenge before us if we want to be globally competitive over the long term,” said Gauthier, the director of the research and policy analysis division of the AUCC.

Canada spent a record high 2.09 per cent of GDP on research in 2001, but since then a booming economy and slower growth in research investments has decreased that ratio to 1.89 per cent in 2007.

Spending in the private sector and the federal government has been stagnant in recent years, a result of the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001 and no real growth in federal since 2005.

While the federal government has not increased spending on its own research and development, it has increasingly allocated funds to university-based research, spending more than $2.9 billion last year through a variety of funding agencies, most notably the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

As a result, university-funded research has taken on an increasingly important role, the report found.

University-funded research accounted for 36 per cent of research funding totalling $10.4 billion in 2007, the report said, a much larger portion than the 17 per cent average among developed countries.

In comparison, Canada’s private sector accounts for 54 per cent of research funding, lower than the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average of 69 per cent.

The AUCC said a continued commitment to university funding is needed to remain competitive.

“We cannot afford to be complacent,” said the report. “The rest of the world is not standing still and the global race for research talent is becoming more and more intense.

“Furthermore, increasing emphasis on research and knowledge mobilization has added to the strain on university resources, particularly because external sponsors of university research often do not cover the full costs of that research.”

About $4.8 billion of this is covered by university operating budgets, with the remainder covered mostly by federal and provincial governments.

The report pointed out that this investment has a direct economic benefit to the country, university research contributing as much as $60 billion to the gross domestic product in 2007 according to some estimates.

Main federal funding mechanisms for university research (2007)
in millions of dollars (Cdn)

CIHR 725
NSERC 698
Indirect Costs Program 315
Canada Foundation for Innovation 298
Canada Research Chairs Program 258
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council 179
Centres for Excellence for Commercialization and Research program 163
Canada Graduate Scholarships program 116
Genome Canada 92
Networks of Centres of Excellence program 80

Total 2,924

Source: AUCC