Landmark research funding benefitting N.L.: ministers
Budget 2018 encourages new scientific studies
Behind the two federal ministers offering comments Tuesday on Budget 2018 and research funding in Canada, a group of men stood and stared.
They were in a photograph — a research team dating back more than a century, led by Victor Campbell, commander of the British Navy.
At age 35, Campbell sailed under Capt. Robert Scott as first officer on the Terra Nova for the British Antarctic expedition of 1910-13. Campbell’s Terra Nova team ventured out separately from Scott’s — mapping, surveying, and conducting geological and geographic work around the continent.
Campbell had been to Newfoundland before his years in the South. He returned to salmon fish in 1923, later settling in the area of Black Duck, on the island’s west coast, establishing a farm. He died in 1956 and is buried in Corner Brook.
From his photograph, he looked out at Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Navdeep Bains, with Veterans Affairs Minister Seamus O’regan, speaking about multibilliondollar commitments to modern day science and fieldwork.
The room in the C-CORE building on Memorial University of Newfoundland’s St. John’s campus holds South Pole expedition memorabilia, a reindeer skin sleeping bag, skis, a surveying compass. The room was packed for the ministers’ question and answer session, with students and university faculty applauding Bains’ description of the landmark Government of Canada commitment.
Budget 2018 includes $1.3 billion over five years for research, including $763 million for the Canada Foundation for Innovation and $572.5 million for a Digital Research Infrastructure Strategy.
There is also over $1.7 billion over five years in support for research, including money for grant councils and research institutes, the Research Support Fund (covering indirect costs of research) and Canada Research Chair positions.
“We’re competing with other jurisdictions,” Bains said of the spending. “We have to step up because other jurisdictions are stepping up.”
While it may be unclear at first blush how that money might flow to directly and immediately benefit communities
throughout Newfoundland and Labrador, MUN president Gary Kachanoski offered a practical example in the form of living stipends for graduate researchers.
“Last year at Memorial University, we spent over $33 million in stipends to graduate students,” Kachanoski said, adding that the university has fared well in funding competitions to date.
Apart from spending in communities, or capital budgets in laboratories, research programs are attracting and retaining international talent, he said.
Long Range Mountains MP Gudie Hutchings said she meets with Kachanoski about once a month. Among other things, they talk about MUN’S research activities and related
investments in her riding. She sees direct financial benefits, but also potential in new people settling in the area.
Sometimes with funding announcements, she said, it can be hard for people to wrap their minds around direct benefits, but the research funding reaches beyond the boundaries of the university and college campuses.
She raised research partnerships with industry, and the ocean supercluster — a private-sector-led group of companies, academic institutions and not-for-profits, with about $125-million in investor commitments for research and development work, largely in Atlantic Canada. The private investment is being paired with (and drawn out by) funding offered from Ottawa.
The supercluster effort is not all at one site, the Liberal MPS said.
“There’s going to be opportunities all over the province, in everyone’s riding, and that’s the part that’s so exciting about this,” Hutchings said.
Bains highlighted all of Canada’s new research funding as a recruitment and retention effort.
“What we’re investing is not simply funding for the short term,” he told reporters. “It’s funding for the long term, it’s jobs for the long term, it’s investments for the long term that will help people grow up, raise their families here and have hopes and aspirations for their children and grandchildren as well.”