Changes to Canada Research Chairs contemplated as program nears mid term

More women and foreign researchers

The Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program is considering a number of options to increase the number of researchers it attracts from other countries and improve the success rates of women. Officials are currently undertaking a third year review — to be released this fall — that could lead to changes that would help the program realize its full slate of objectives.

Two years after its official formation with $900 million in year-end money, the CRC is being judged a smashing success for giving universities a powerful tool for retaining its best researchers. With 540 chairs already announced and another batch to be unveiled in the coming days, program administrators say they are impressed with the quality of the chair holders and the diversity of the disciplines being targeted.

They’re also encouraged by the extremely low incidence of so-called raiding of small university faculty by the larger players. To date, only 6% of chair holders are transfers from other institutions — a rate considered equivalent to standard mobility levels between institutions.

“That’s very good news. What we want with this program is to retain our best researchers. They’re a scarce resource,” says CRC president Dr René Durocher. “But we also want to recruit outside the country and of the 540, we’ve recruited 57 — 34 are repatriated Canadians and 23 are foreigners — which is about 10%. We expected to recruit many more people from outside the country and we are thinking of how to do that through incentives or other means.”

Recruitment from abroad will be promoted advertising in foreign publications, and working with Citizenship Canada and Human Resources Development Canada to see whether the process of granting foreign chair holders entry into the country can be improved. It is more difficult for universities to attract foreign researchers, but activity such as the mobilization of faculty to present papers outside the country may help raise the visibility of Canada as an attractive place to pursue a research career.

STEERING COMMITTEE TO DECIDE ON CHANGES

Durocher says there is no fixed target in mind, but he suggests that somewhere between 25% and 40% may be a suitable goal. He says that with the third year review now underway, “everything is on the table” The steering committee will make the final decision on any changes to the program once the report is released in September.

The steering committee will also examine the low participation rate of women in the CRC program with a view to increasing the numbers. Currently, just 16% of the Chairs are held by women — a percentage significantly lower the 25% of Canadian faculty who are women.

“There is a concern there. There’s no reason to believe that there are not as many outstanding women as there are men,” says Durocher, adding that a gender study is being conducted on the three major discipline areas — social sciences, natural sciences and health. “We will send the report to all the universities and tell them they have to do more in this area. At the same time, we can’t change the same high standards of the program. The government doesn’t want to recruit standard or good researchers, it wants excellent ones.”

Those two areas of concern aside, the CRC has been met with considerable enthusiasm among the 61 eligible universities, particularly with the allocation formula to ensure that Chair funding is distributed equitably. The requirement for all universities to develop a Strategic Research Plan (SRP) has also helped focus the allocation process towards existing and emerging institutional strengths. The Univ of Toronto, for instance, is using its CRC allocation to assist in its goal of ranking among the top 10 public research-intensive universities in the world. To that end, it identified 25 research themes in six broad disciplinary areas and will attempt to build research clusters around each one. (Summaries of all the SRPs are posted on the CRC web site, www.chairs.gc.ca.

The hard work put into the SRPs by the universities is paying off with well-chosen candidates placed in fields that each institution considers crucial to its future research activity. To date, the success rate of the program is 88%. “That’s just fine with us,” says Durocher.

“It means the universities are doing their job. They have their own experts to look at this.”

KEY PLANK OF INNOVATION AGENDA

In addition to the $900 million set aside for 2000 Chairs, the Canada Foundation for Innovation is also providing $250 million in research infrastructure support, which will leverage $375 million from other sources. That gives the CRC program a financial punch of more than $1.5 billion, contributing substantially to the federal government’s drive to doubling its support for R&D.

“With this program we now have a good combination to recruit and repatriate. It makes Canada more dynamic, research-oriented and able to attract research funding,” he says. “It’s a great program and something very special. It’s almost un-Canadian to be so bold.”

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