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Ottawa’s funding cuts for breakthrough scientific research hurts all Canadians
All this pioneering work was funded by Canada’s federal agency for discovery health research – the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). (Pexels Photo)
Canada’s talent for making important scientific discoveries that improve people’s health was recently honoured again – by the Gairdner Foundation International Awards.
These awards recognized a number of ground-breaking discoveries: the identification of GLP-1 which is the basis of drugs to treat Type 2 diabetes and obesity (2021); the development of a nanoparticle envelope for mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 (2022); and the discovery of leukemia stem cells that explain relapses after treatment (2022).
All this pioneering work was funded by Canada’s federal agency for discovery health research – the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
These scientists, and scores more like them, have been supported for decades by the CIHR’s investigator-initiated discovery research grant program. Their discoveries have had a transformative impact on our society, delivering both health and economic benefits in Canada and globally.
The wrong target for budget cuts
Yet, this demonstrated record of Canadian research breakthroughs has incomprehensibly been targeted for severe funding reductions by the federal government.
As a result, in the most recent competition for CIHR funding, the success rate of applicants hit an all-time low of 15.3 per cent — meaning 84.7 per cent of applicants were rejected outright — and those who were selected were subject to a 23.5-per-cent budget cut. This will have damaging consequences not only for health advances but also for economic growth.
Economists in the U.S. have clearly documented the link between government-funded research and development (R&D), economic growth and productivity. Unfortunately, while other countries increase their discovery research funding investment, Canada’s is decreasing.
Canada is the only G7 country that has reduced government-funded R&D as a proportion of GDP. For instance, on a per-capita basis, CIHR funding is one-fifth that of its U.S. counterpart, the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
While the U.S. recognizes that growing health research support has a positive return on investment, Canada’s latest federal budget proposes that the CIHR funding continue decreasing on a per-capita basis to even less than the current one-fifth that of the NIH.
Canada will pay dearly for short-changing discovery research. Top-level and young, emerging scientific talent will have little choice but to emigrate to countries where discovery research is better supported. This will have a negative impact on social, health, economic and productivity benefits across the country.
Once these leading researchers are gone, they are gone, and we will be the sicker and poorer for it.
Top-down assessments for funding do not work
Increasingly, decision-makers in Canada have preferred to fund mainly what they perceive as strategic research goals. These are bets based on top-down assessments rather than on ideas percolating up from investigators and scientists. Few if any of these bets meet criteria that measure whether the proposed R&D will be done well, or done at all.
Without accountability for outcomes, these bets represent high-risk roulette rather than thoughtful planning. They are mainly one-off investments, often based on political or short-term economic factors, with inadequate review procedures and few clearly articulated milestones or accountability checks.
They may make good photo-ops, but they are not the stuff of what health and wealth creation are made.
One example is the publicly owned Biologic Manufacturing Centre (BMC) in Montreal. In the four years since the federal government spent about $130 million to establish the facility that would produce COVID vaccines, BMC has missed numerous scheduled start dates for production and still has not shipped a single dose for public distribution.
Since 2016, such programs have been given $16 billion from taxpayers but have not produced any discoveries that come close to matching the CIHR-funded discovery work of scientists recognized by the Gairdner Foundation.
This should not be the case because Canada’s discovery health researchers are amongst the best in the world.
For example, Dr. Dan Drucker won the Gairdner Award as well as the prestigious Wolf Prize in Medicine for his work on Type 2 diabetes and obesity. One can assess the economic impact of such research by noting this comment from Goldman Sachs: ”Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy could boost the US economy by a trillion dollars in a few years.”
What does Alberta’s Provincial Priorities Act signal for Canadian research?
Another Canadian Gairdner winner and Wolf Prize laureate is Dr. Nahum Sonenberg. His work on how proteins are made has had a significant impact on cancer biology, dementia research, mRNA vaccines and is helping us understand the molecular basis of memory.
A compound discovered through that work is currently the basis of a drug in clinical trials for the treatment of memory disorders.
Like all the Gairdner-recognized Canadian discoveries, Drucker’s and Sonenberg’s work was funded by the CIHR’s individual investigator-initiated discovery research program.
CIHR is a federal agency with a proven track record for funding researchers who make important discoveries.
Sadly (for them and all Canadians) the nearly 85 per cent of unsuccessful applicants for CIHR funding may now need to abandon their Canadian labs and go elsewhere for support. Many of those who did not make the cut were judged by peer review to be outstanding, but were nonetheless rejected due to the meagre funds available.
The conclusion is glaring: The record of actual success for supported discovery research dwarfs that of projects funded by bureaucrats and political decision-makers who are betting taxpayer money on proposals that have no accountability for outcomes.
We implore these decision-makers to remove the blinders that prevent them from adequately funding the federal agencies of CIHR, the Natural Sciences and Engineering and Research Council (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Canada needs this research support so that the discoveries that can be made will be made.
Robust discovery research empowers science to bring better health and greater economic benefits for all Canadians. The next federal budget will tell us if Canada’s discovery research enterprise sinks or swims.
This article first appeared on Policy Options and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
