Good News, but…

There was good news for science and engineering research in Budget 2004 in late March. The NSERC base budget would increase by $39 million per year. In addition, the amount available to help the universities meet the indirect costs of research would increase by $20 million per year. Given the cautions about a lack of money that were being sounded publicly right up to budget day, I believe that university research was treated very well. The momentum for improving research support in Canada that the federal government developed in the budgets of 1997 and subsequent years was being maintained. More than that, I believe that by providing these increases, the government acknowledged that university research is of value to Canada, and that the granting agencies are responsible custodians of public funds.

The Budget Plan 2004 described the purpose of the new funds in these words: “This will support additional opportunities for new and talented researchers, and help promote the translation of knowledge into commercial and social benefits for Canadians.” I read the first part of that sentence as the government’s positive response to the extraordinary growth of first-time applicants for NSERC Discovery Grants that I discussed in my last editorial. And rightly so. This growth, and the high quality of the new applicants, are great news for Canada. The government is clearly succeeding in promoting more and better research in Canada, and wants to maintain that record. (In the event, after transferring some applications to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and eliminating a few ineligible ones, NSERC was left with 981 first-time applicants in the 2004 competition, of whom 676 or 69 per cent received some funding. At the same time, 259 previously funded researchers retired from the NSERC system. The net effect was that almost 420 new principal investigators with grants were added to Canada’s university science and engineering research community.)

The second part of the sentence quoted from the budget plan clearly refers to the commercialization of the results of university research, a subject that the government has consistently identified as a priority. This is an area in which NSERC has been helping universities for the better part of two decades, and two of our small but effective programs in this area – Intellectual Property Management and Idea to Innovation – were explicitly recognized in The Budget Plan 2004 in an area of spending that the government expected to see tripled.

The increase of $39 million was less than we had hoped for, but enough to allow us to deal with some major problems. Most of the new money will go into Discovery Grants and Research Tools and Instruments. Significant pressures remain in many other programs, of course, and small improvements will be made where feasible. The pilot projects in the initiatives under the “New Vision” are being launched as planned, but funded very modestly indeed. And we have been told by the universities to expect a large number of first-time applicants for Discovery Grants again next year, which means that the relief provided by Budget 2004 will be temporary.

So far so good, but the $39 million increase in NSERC’s base budget is still not a done deal. The Budget Bill was debated and passed in the House of Commons, it passed through Senate, and it was given Royal Assent in May. These Parliamentary steps are necessary for NSERC to be able to spend those new funds, but they are not sufficient. Contrary to appearances, the announcement of an increase in the Budget Speech does not authorize NSERC to spend the amount of new money specified. It only allows us to make a submission to Treasury Board for authority to spend it. In the past, making that case has been relatively straightforward. Needless to say, Treasury Board approval cannot be taken for granted, but NSERC’s experience has generally been that our submissions were being approved without unreasonable delay. The final step in the process by which Parliament authorizes the spending of public funds is the vote on the government’s Estimates, the list of all spending approved by Treasury Board. The Estimates are referred to committees which study them and report back to the House of Commons for the vote. The entire process is usually finished in the spring, before Parliament rises for the summer.

But this year is different. The election call which came very soon after the Budget Bill was passed did not leave enough time for the process to be completed before Parliament was dissolved. Whatever the outcome of the election, it takes time to form a new Cabinet, always with the possibility of organizational changes at the centre of government, and the various approval processes follow after that. All of that to say that at the time of writing we don’t know when NSERC will receive authority to spend the new $39 million.

So while there certainly was good news for the Canadian science and engineering university research community in the last federal budget, it may be some time yet before that good news can be translated into action.