Over the past two years, the federal government has introduced new guidelines and measures to keep sensitive scientific research safe from Canada’s industrial competitors and military adversaries.
But an expert panel suggests the policy overhaul on its own is not enough. In a world of shifting alliances and unpredictable technical advances, Canadian scientists must adopt a more guarded and security-conscious stand to safeguard their work.
That message comes from a report released Tuesday by the Council of Canadian Academies.
At its heart, the report tackles the paradoxical question of how to keep Canadian science open and collaborative in order to foster new advances, while also ensuring that the discoveries and innovation that flow from the research Canadians pay for do not end up harming the national interest by falling into the wrong hands.
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The answer, in the words of the report, requires adopting a “modern research mindset” when it comes to balancing the need for open and secure science, including the geopolitical context in which science is conducted.
“We want our researchers to have that modern mindset,” said panel chair, Martha Crago, a professor and former vice-president of research and innovation at McGill University in Montreal. “I think the very invention of that terminology in this report signals Canada’s really interesting and leading role in helping to develop that.”
The independent report was co-commissioned by Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), two federal agencies with a particularly strong interest in research security. But Dr. Crago said when it came time to brief officials ahead of the report’s release, representatives from 10 other federal departments were also on hand to hear what the panel had to say.
“There was a lot of interest in government across many ministries,” she said.
Canada’s recent track record with respect to research security has not been a stellar one. The most high-profile example involved the firing of two researchers at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg in 2021. Documents released last year show the government concluded that they had passed scientific secrets to China.
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But while the case looms large over the conversation about research security in Canada, the latest report concerns itself with a far broader range of research projects under way in academic and industrial labs across the country. In such environments, the risk to Canada may be more ambiguous and the harm caused by the sharing of information entirely unintentional.
The challenge is made all the greater by the fact that science tends to progress most rapidly and benefit more people when information can be shared freely. Over the past two decades or so, that view has been supported by a burgeoning open science movement.
More recently, research agencies in democratic countries have tended to take a more nuanced approach. The new report does this in part by providing two case studies, one in pathogen research and one in ocean research, which serve to make the risks that can arise in research more concrete.
As part of its effort to improve awareness of the issue, the federal government released new national security guidelines for research partnerships in 2023. The following year, François-Philippe Champagne, then-minister of innovation, science and industry, introduced Canada’s current policy on sensitive technology research. Under the policy, scientists who collaborate with one of the named research organizations – mostly in China and Russia – on a Canadian government list, would be ineligible for federal funding.
“Projects that present a high risk will not receive government funding, and any applicant who identifies potential risk must develop and follow a risk mitigation plan as a condition of receiving and keeping their funding throughout the project," said Riyadh Nazerally, a spokesperson for the ministry.
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Nevertheless, such measures show that Canada has started rather than completed what it must do to tighten security around sensitive research, said Jacqueline Littlewood, a panel member and the University of Alberta’s director of research security.
While the federal requirements provide a framework, particularly when new projects are funded, the need for security is more ever-present.
“Risk evolves just as research evolves,” Ms. Littlewood added. “It’s something that you need to be thinking of and adjusting and assessing throughout the course of the research life cycle.
In 2017, prior to Ms. Littlewood’s coming to the University of Alberta, a team at the university published work on a synthetic version of the horsepox virus that they had created as an aide to vaccine research. The publication raised widespread concerns that their technique could be used to reconstitute smallpox for use as a biological weapon.
If similar work were under way today, Ms. Littlewood said, the aim would be to have such risks flagged earlier and the situation “wouldn’t have gotten to the point that it did.”
One way of doing this is with multidisciplinary review committees, a method employed by Germany that came up when the panel was looking at practices in other countries.
Robert Asselin, chief executive of the U15 group of research-intensive Canadian universities, who was not involved with the report, said that its findings fit with where the Canadian research community knows it needs to go in response to new realities abroad.
“I would say this is a structural change, not a temporary one,” he said. ”Countries are more inward looking, and they are more thoughtful about rivalries on the technology side."