Budget 2018 Science Policy Report Card

The federal government of Canada is releasing its annual budget Tuesday. Rumour has it that this budget will have a significant focus on science, and on women. Both of these issues are of interest to us. We are scientists, and because we are early in our careers as professors and research scientists, we have a higher proportion of women than more senior cohorts.

About ACECHR. Our purpose has been and continues to be to advocate for a healthy, equitable, sustainable health research enterprise. We have been engaging actively with federal science funding policy since we formed in 2016 in response to changes in health research funding. We have worked with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and with officials from the federal government to address projected inequities in health research funding for early career and mid-career investigators and for investigators who are women. Results from grant funding competitions with and without the policies we advocated show that without these policies, gaps in funding would be even worse than they are. We have also advocated for evidence-based investment in research through social media campaigns and--together with organizations like Evidence for Democracy, Science & Policy Exchange, and large groups of researchers across fields--supported researchers meeting with elected representatives to discuss evidence-based science policy.

About the Naylor report. Our group formed around concerns with changes at CIHR. Many of our members were invited to several different meetings with the Fundamental Science Review, most notably the panels focusing on early career researchers and on equity. Like many in the scientific community, we were concerned when the members of the Fundamental Science Review were announced and were almost entirely former administrators, not active scientists. However, we were pleased to read their measured, evidence-based report, grounded in a solid understanding of how science and research function. We looked forward (and continue to look forward) to the federal government acting on the advice they had requested.

About our report card. We will be assessing the budget on how well this government does on six items:

1. Restoring TriCouncil. After over a "decade of neglect" and insufficient untargeted funds, Canadian research funding agencies (the “TriCouncil”) are struggling. Canada is not keeping up with our peer countries in terms of investment in science. A 30% increase over 4 years would bring these agencies back to 2007 levels of funding.
2. Open, unfettered programs. Canada has focused too much on targeted funding (i.e., attempting to pick winners) and not enough unfettered funding that would allow funding agencies to be agile and responsive to rapidly changing science. New spending needs to heavily emphasize unfettered support. "Unfettered" means delivered through existing TriCouncil mechanisms that are not targeted by research area or career stage.  Funds awarded through these mechanisms are subject to thorough, expert peer review that rejects many, if not most, applications. The awards are moderate in size and scientists must make strong justifications for continued funding every few years. This ensures that funds are spent in the most rigorously accountable and scientifically productive way possible. In contrast, targeted funds often consist of extremely large single lump sums awarded through arguably politicized processes. Because these usually operate outside the TriCouncil framework, peer review and oversight are ad hoc, meaning they necessitate redundant bureaucracies and may fail to reach the same standards of rigour as TriCouncil funding.
3. Operating, salary, infrastructure & indirect funds. Doing good science requires four streams of funding: (1) Operating/research funds. Operating funds pay for studies. They fund things like staff and student salaries (often about 75% of operating budgets), chemicals used in experiments, etc. (2) Salary. Depending on what kind of job scientists have, they may need to secure external funding to fully or partially fund their salary. Such external funding can help protect their time for research. (3) Infrastructure. Depending on what type of research people do, they may need equipment or laboratory space that costs money to set up. (4) Indirect funds. Researchers need an institution at which to do their work, and institutions need indirect funds to function and support research. All of these require appropriate levels of funding. Funding one or two of these areas while ignoring the others is foolish and short-sighted.
4. Equity, diversity & inclusion. To be sure we are funding the best research, it’s important to avoid letting common societal biases influence funding decisions. TriCouncil agencies track and report on key dimensions of funding outcomes, are working on making this tracking more comprehensive, and implement policies to address potential sources of bias. Targeted programs, on the other hand, typically do not report on this aspect of their programs. Publicly-available data suggest that they perform very poorly on this metric.
5. Sustainability. As we have emphasized from the beginning of our organization, as an organization of early career researchers, we want proportional funding, not special envelopes for early career researchers. We don’t want bridges to nowhere. Every early career researcher awarded a 5-year operating grant will be mid-career by the time that grant ends. A sustainable research funding enterprise requires funding across all career stages. Sustainability also requires regularizing funding streams; for example, for the Canada Foundation for Innovation, which provides a large portion of infrastructure funding.
6. Honesty. We don’t want to see any pretending that already-allocated funds are new funds. We don’t want to see funds misrepresented as open or unfettered when in fact they are targeted or ring-fenced by research field, career stage, or other factors. Some ring-fenced funding is appropriate; for example, our group strongly supported CIHR’s initiative to ring-fence funding for Indigenous health research. However, too much ring-fencing is bad for science.

Overall grade on evidence-based science policy. Our overall impression of this government’s commitment to implementing the evidence-based report they commissioned and investing in the future of Canadian science.