Up to 15,000 medical research staff face layoffs in Canada,
Work unrelated to virus suspended, but workers don’t qualify for subsidies
Up to 15,000 medical research staff across the country face layoffs this week because they fall through the cracks of all the aid programs offered by the federal government.
They are health researchers, research nurses, lab technicians and many others whose research work was unrelated to COVID-19 and who do not qualify for the federal wage subsidy, nor are their salaries covered by any federal infusion of funds to tide people over.
Now, top research directors and hospital leaders warn that even COVID-19 clinical trials are at risk of halting if there is no support for the lab operations and staff at the hospitalbased research institutes where much of that work is going on.
Brad Wouters, senior scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and a leader of research at the University Health Network, the largest research hospital in Canada, told the Star that although there had been ongoing talks with Ottawa through the national association to figure out a solution, nothing has addressed the pressing need that will see thousands of layoffs begin by week’s end.
“We’ve reached the end of our rope — without a clear signal from the government this week, we will have no choice but to start laying off researchers as planned,” he said.
“When this happens, it will jeopardize both our ability to support our ongoing research efforts against COVID-19, and our ability to restart research into all kinds of critical areas, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative diseases, that affect millions of Canadians.”
Clinical and research trials that were unrelated to the coronavirus were suspended or cancelled by order of the federal government as the country went into lockdown in midMarch, including more than 600 cancer research trials.
Hospital-based labs scrambled to safely wind down research operations or to switch to coronavirus research, with many workers jumping into the race to find therapies or a COVID-19 cure. But Wouters told a Commons health committee last week that “based on a technicality,” many of the thousands who are not working on COVID-19 don’t qualify for the federal wage subsidy.
They are considered to work in the public sector, even though their work isn’t financed by the hospitals’ operating budgets or provincial health budgets.
It is instead financed by a combination of public and private research grants, charitable donations, allotments from foundations, and contracts for clinical trials that are almost all funded privately by biotech or pharmaceutical companies. Even revenue from hospital parking fees sometimes gets channelled towards hospitalbased research.
HealthCareCAN, the association representing more than 55
Canadian hospitals, told the health committee those funding sources have “all but evaporated.”
The association wrote Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last month to flag the problem.
Ottawa did provide more than $290 million through the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR) and two other federal granting agencies to maintain income support for research trainees and post-doctoral fellows whose work was affected. And CIHR granted an extra year for researchers to spend existing grants.
But CIHR provides money for only 10 per cent of all the research activity in hospitalbased institutes, which spend about $3 billion a year on research into cancer, heart disease, Alzheimers and other medical conditions.
So there remains a significant funding gap as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupts that research, and all the usual sectors that used to contribute to it.
Wouters said allowing the institutes access to the wage subsidy would come at marginal cost to the government.
“Staff we lay off for lack of access to the subsidy will draw on the Canada Emergency Response Benefit,” he told the committee.
“It is clear that it would be much more effective to keep our employees part of UH, which compensates them at a rate of about $350 less per week. But those staff will be unproductive for as long as they are laid off, and I have no sense of if or when we will be able to rehire them or if they will depart to opportunities in other countries.”
“I am very worried that losing all these critical research staff now will set Canada back by decades in this globally competitive sector,” said Wouters.
Asked by the Star why those workers are not a priority, Trudeau insisted Wednesday that his government has supported scientific research during the coronavirus outbreak.
“That is why our investments in science, our investments in supporting graduate students, our investments in supporting research institutes have been significant and will continue.”
However, he added he would personally look into the issue.
“Our focus is on making sure that scientists get the support they need right across the country and we will continue to do that.”