Four years ago, I wrote a blog post about Canadian brain drain, seeking to convince readers (though arguably not very well) that, with the right policies, Canada could be the intellectual beneficiary of increasingly intolerant and anti-science political climates in our two closest allies, the United States and the United Kingdom. At the time, the U.S. had just elected Donald Trump to the Presidency, and the U.K. had voted to leave the European Union behind. To my eyes, never before had it been so obvious that, as our government is fond of saying, the world needs more Canada.
My proposal was relatively simple: Increase research funding, and particularly the portion directed to basic science. Then, use that commitment to recruit scientists threatened by the political realities in these and other countries, particularly people of colour and women, to benefit our country. This might seem like a bit of a leap, but consider that one of the leading COVID-19 vaccines came from the mind of a perennially underfunded and underappreciated Hungarian female scientist, Dr. Katalin Karikó, for a company founded by a husband-and-wife team of Turkish origins, and another was created by a Canadian emigrant, for a company created by a Lebanese-born Canadian immigrant, who left after university for the United States to conduct a PhD.
Obviously, a lot has changed since then.
The world is in the throes of a global pandemic, which the World Health Organization scarily warned, despite all its suffering and disruption, is not “the big one.”
Joe Biden handily defeated Donald Trump in the U.S. last November, and quickly signaled a pivot to evidence-based decision-making and respect for science by announcing prominent roles for climate change and public health policy leaders.
The U.K. left the European Union at the beginning of this year, securing a last-minute deal to remain eligible for Horizon research funding from the EU, and has created a number of programs to compensate for some of the benefits it lost in the process: these include a points-based immigration system similar to Canada’s, albeit one that requires applicants to have job offers and is much more heavily weighed towards attracting PhD holders, particularly in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM); the new Turing scheme, which intends to fund international placements and exchanges for 35,000 U.K. students; and, most importantly, a budget commitment to increase science funding by 80 percent over four years, bringing the total to up to 0.8 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP).
But, at the same time, a lot has stayed the same. Though R&D funding under Donald Trump decreased heavily in his first year in office (partly due to a change in the definition of “development” activities), it grew slightly from that baseline every year since. The U.K.’s science funding remained relatively stable, and the recent announcement of an increase is certainly good news.
And Canada? Well, not much has changed here either. Unfortunately, despite all the political turmoil abroad, brain drain is still very much going strong. Tricouncil funding increased, but not to the levels recommended by Dr. David Naylor in 2017’s Canada’s Fundamental Science Review Report (of #SupportTheReport fame) and, concerningly, showed poor trends in success applications (with CIHR’s most recent competition having a dismal 15.8 percent success rate, and NSERC success rates for early career scientists dropping by nearly 20 percent when compared to 2016), suggesting Canada continues to starve research.
Worst of all, this period coincided with a number of “creative” initiatives in funding schemes, including CIHR’s Foundation grants and the Superclusters Initiative. The former significantly underfunded female scientists, as outlined by Dr. Holly Witteman and colleagues in The Lancet, and younger researchers and certain areas of science, according to the CIHR’s own sunsetting analysis. As for Superclusters, well, they were intended to build on traditional areas of intellectual and economic strength across the country. In theory, they would grow innovation and collaboration between industry and academia, and hence drive business investment in these areas, but the program, announced in 2015, has gotten off to a very slow start since its launch in 2018. Not only does that mean that money that could have funded science and innovation through traditional means has been diverted to other less well-proven methods, but also that this program has carried significant opportunity costs for Canadian innovators.
The closest the Government came to listening to my previous post was probably the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program, which was designed to recruit top talent to Canada in a process informed by equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI). Of the 24 Chairs granted, 14 went to women, though unfortunately only a handful of the 24 went to people of colour, suggesting we still have a ways to go.
All of this to say, we probably missed our moment. Not only have circumstances changed politically in both the U.S. and the U.K. in ways likely to lead to a drive to fund and showcase the best of each country, but also… COVID. The coronavirus has changed so much of the world so quickly, and it would be naïve to think that people’s calculus for their own lives hasn’t also changed dramatically. I won’t deny it’s possible that some of the reasons cited by emigrating Canadian graduates, which include a lack of awareness of Canadian companies, concern about having limited opportunity to work on different projects, and lower salaries than in the U.S., are less important now.
But it is also possible that, if we get caught on the back foot, and like in 2016 fail to move fast and champion Canada, other countries will fly right past us as they invest to rebuild after the pandemic is over, exacerbating our brain drain problem. Figuring out how to address graduates’ concerns, those of academics who have seen their funding decrease through either reduced total budgets or lower success rates, and those of businesses scared or unprepared to take risks will be important. Canada needs to do better at helping Canadians succeed, and it can only do so by providing the resources and support that are needed, even when that is less “sexy” than some new program or funding scheme.
A recent column by Daniel Munro provides four strong suggestions for how Canada can improve its return on investment in innovation:
1) work more closely with companies to create granular innovation strategies that leverage Canadian strengths;
2) create programs to improve technology adoption in receptor Canadian companies;
3) identify the skills companies need to innovate, and train Canadians to fill that need; and,
4) Ensure that all Canadians are empowered and prepared to participate, and hence to benefit, from our innovation investments.
This latter point is critical and again emphasizes the need to provide societal supports to ensure all Canadians can take advantage of any new opportunities. Beyond that, the first three points highlight the need for more communication between companies and academics, and more translating between the skills individual industries need and the skills and knowledge training programs provide. The reason brain drain is a concern is that knowledge transfer often comes from a person moving to a new place (whether that is a new job or a new country), so finding a way to keep that knowledge in Canada, but ensure it has impact in industry, is the kind of large-scale project that only a government can do well.
Rebuilding after COVID is going to be a massive undertaking, and no single strategy will suffice. But the only way to succeed will be by prioritizing Canada’s strengths: our diversity, our collaborative spirit and our bright minds.
I hope that, once the pandemic is over, Canadians rediscover an appetite for building a better, fairer world, and translate that into increased investments in clean technology, the basic science that allowed us to make a number of vaccines in record time, and the clinical sciences, engineering, social sciences and other fields that worked tirelessly to inform decision-making.
I hope we work hard to decrease our inequality, and instead of patting ourselves on the back for not being as bad as others, we make it our goal to become a world leader in equity. I also hope that, unlike what I stated in my previous post, we never again take money out of public health funding to fund any other priorities.
More than anything, I hope we remember that our diversity is our strength, and that Canada is better when we invest in that, here and elsewhere in the world.
Camila Londono
Latest posts by Camila Londono (see all)
- Making a case for investing in Canada revisited: Prioritizing our strengths - January 14, 2021
- Making a case for research investment in Canada: Can we drive reverse brain drain now? - January 11, 2017
- Ending on a high note – Day 3 of TMM2016 - October 31, 2016
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