The McGill University campus in Montreal. Between 2011 and 2019, researchers per 1,000 people employed in Canada dropped from eighth in the OECD to 18th.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
John Turley-Ewart is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail, a regulatory compliance consultant and a Canadian banking historian.
You found the opportunity you devoted years of study to prepare for. How it came to be defied imagination. In late 2024, U.S. voters sent Donald Trump to the White House for a second term. Trash-talking Canada, attacks on our country’s auto sector and tariffs on Canadian goods cost thousands of Canadian jobs after Mr. Trump took office last January.
Canadian nationalism thrives. We are elbows up, innovation-hungry, boycotting U.S. wine, liquor and travel to American destinations. Build Canada and buy Canadian become a duty.
You look at the university research application fine print. The $1.7-billion over 12 years to kick-start Canadian innovation that Ottawa is promising isn’t for you, an aspiring scholar struggling to make a difference here. No, the research jackpot is for current and rising U.S academic stars and anyone but Canadians in Canada. You are shocked, as all Canadians should be, that our own stars here in this country are prohibited from applying.
Ottawa aims to attract top research talent, including Canadians working abroad
Perverse outcomes arise from the best of intentions – more so opportunistic ones, such as Canada’s ill-considered attempt to capitalize on the turmoil at renowned American universities, such as Harvard, Columbia, Cornell and Northwestern, that have drawn the ire of the Trump administration.
Prime Minister Mark Carney foreshadowed this policy last April in a U.S. podcast on which he explained that “as the U.S. is pushing out brains … as it is quite a hostile environment in the academic world in the United States now, we can take advantage of that.”
Advanced digital technologies, health, clean technology, climate resilience and the Arctic, food and water security, democratic resilience, manufacturing and advanced materials, as well as defence and dual-use technologies, make up the strategic subject areas this funding will support.
The policy is now live as universities seek applications by March from established academics in the U.S. and elsewhere to fill the new Canada Impact and Research Chairs Program announced in Ottawa’s Nov. 4 budget.
Western University vice-president (research) Penny Pexman pointed to this opportunity on LinkedIn, noting: “We’re grateful to the Government of Canada for this ambitious global talent recruitment initiative.”
Canadian research universities are grateful for any funding initiative – and for good reason. The Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System concluded in 2023 that “data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development consistently shows that Canada underperforms against global peers in terms of research and development … performing well below the OECD average.”
Finland’s goal, for instance, is to devote 4 per cent of its GDP to research by 2030. Canada devotes less than half of that and will not catch up by 2030, even with this new federal funding.
Between 2011 and 2019, researchers per 1,000 people employed in Canada dropped from eighth in the OECD to 18th. It simply doesn’t put food on the table to be a university researcher in Canada.
For hard-working and idealistic young Canadian scholars, the reality is bleak. The advisory panel also reported in 2023 that the “current support for graduate students – the researchers of tomorrow – is at a breaking point. The values of the government’s awards for university research trainees have remained virtually stagnant for the past 20 years.”
Canada’s research and scientific spending is declining relative to other nations, report says
With 1,000 more researchers vying for a piece of the small Canadian base research funding pie, the squeeze these stars from elsewhere will put on our funding capacity will intensify unless substantial new base funds are allocated, a point made by Quebec’s chief scientist, Rémi Quirion, after the federal budget was tabled.
Atop all this is the hard truth noted in a study by the Centre for International Governance Innovation: “Research that is funded by the federal government is generating more economic benefit for foreign companies and countries than it is for Canada.”
The economic mindset in government that inspires such a policy is a familiar one to Canada’s business innovators. For years they have witnessed Ottawa dole out enormous subsidies to foreign corporations, encouraging branch-plant economics, while Canadian businesses intent on research and development go begging.
Ottawa’s preference for disgruntled American academics deemed stars may seem clever, politically satisfying even, but it could very well turn our biggest research universities into U.S. intellectual branch plants at our expense.