Granting councils receive $121-million Budget boost, but funding allocation questioned

SSHRC president questions disparity

A pre-Budget meeting to determine the minimum funding increase that the granting councils were willing to accept had little impact on the levels actually delivered, according to the president of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Dr Marc Reneau says the SSHRC request of an $18-20-million annual hike he conveyed in the meeting with Dr Gilbert Normand, secretary of state for science, research and development, went unheeded, while the minimum request of $20 million from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) was substantially exceeded.

The Budget provided both SSHRC and NSERC with a permanent 7% increase to their annual funding allocation, but SSHRC’s significantly smaller base resulted in additional funding of just $9.5 million while NSERC received $36.5 million or nearly four times as much. Reneau proposed a SSHRC “survival budget” that included a funding increase of just under $20 million, an amount roughly equivalent to the increase proposed by NSERC.

“I’m happy to get $9.5 million but I’m discouraged. With this increase, we won’t be able to support both a 40% success rate for our standard research grants and support our 22 Community University Research Alli-ance (CURA) projects simultaneously,” says Reneau. “NSERC got $36.5 million but asked for $20 million, so they got nearly double, don’t ask me why. The government opened the tap for NSERC but not for us and it’s setting us back. We have no strong voice out there.”

Reneau says the research programs funded by SSHRC are experiencing an annual increase of 20%. Last year, the CURA program was suspended in order to maintain a 40% success rate for research grant applicants and Reneau was hoping the government would provide the money needed to allow CURA to continue.

“There’s a huge cultural change going on in the research areas we support and our children continue to go into these fields,” he says. “If we supported students at the same level as NSERC it would cost an additional $100 million. It’s huge.”

Reneau’s comments stand in stark contrast to those of the other granting council heads, who commended the government for finding scarce resources amidst a security-dominated Budget. NSERC president Dr Tom Brzustowski says the government’s decision to maintain its commitment to making Canada more innovative in the wake of September 11 and in the midst of an economic slowdown is to be lauded. And Dr Alan Bernstein, president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), asserts that the $75-million increase to his organization demonstrates a “tremendous vote of confidence in health research and CIHR itself”.

Taken together, the Budget boosted granting council funding by $121 million annually or an average of 10.7%. Government officials say the percentage increases to the granting councils were based on the funding levels received by the granting agencies for FY01-02 which are estimated to total $1.13 billion, according to the latest Statistics Canada data (see page 6). The increase is even more substantial if the new $200-million fund for the indirect costs of university research is included (see page 2).

For NSERC, the new funding permits the Council to deal with the growth in new applicants for its discovery grants as well as the second and third year of funding for researchers receiving grants last year. It also preserves funding for equipment grants, which were in jeopardy of being suspended prior to the Budget announcement.

“I’m very conscious that this Budget comes after September 11 and the economic slowdown, so I’m very grateful,” says Brzustowski. “This represents a very important commitment from the government that the goal of moving to fifth (in global R&D spending) is still important.”

CIHR’s Bernstein also acknowledges that his organization’s 15% increase was delivered in what was essentially a security Budget, allowing it to stay on course in its evolution towards a $1-billion agency. Following the Budget, Health minister Alan Rock reiterated his goal of allocating the equivalent of 1% of the cost of health care towards health research.

“This increase will broaden our base in the open research competition and allow the institutes to develop their strategic plans. It will also assist in knowledge translation, including commercialization and policy development,” he says. “If the government continues with this level of investment, I’ll be happy.”

Bernstein says the government’s decision to bring down a Budget in December rather than its late-February time frame gives CIHR a two-month jump on planning for the next year, giving its research priorities committee solid data on how much money it has at its disposal. He adds that an even more optimum scenario would be a three-year rolling budget, giving CIHR maximum flexibility in its long-range financial forecasting.

“Given our mandate and capacity and science opportunities, our Budget still needs to grow to $1 billion within four years,” says Bernstein. “But that’s not a hard and fast timeframe because it will depend on inflation and where the science is.”

CIHR INCREASE SUPPORTED

While SSHRC’s Reneau takes exception to the disparity in funding between his council and NSERC, he acknowledges that the larger increase awarded to CIHR is justified, given the scope of the research it funds and the importance of health research.

“CIHR has a bomb on its hands and it’s the National Institutes of Health in the US. (US president George) Bush is putting a lot of money into NIH and Canada has to keep up,” he says. “CIHR also represents an effort to open up to all areas of health research and it is being defended by a minister that believes in it.”

NSERC’s Brzustowski also supports the increase afforded CIHR for many of the same reasons. “CIHR has a new mandate and therefore a significant expansion of funding was justified,” he says. “They were also promised a doubling of the CIHR budget and that issue has not gone away.”

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