Aid incoming for non-COVID researchers
OTTAWA— Leading health scientists say Ottawa’s decision to extend $450 million in federal wage support and operating costs to non-COVID-19 research will avoid imminent layoffs of up to 15,000 staff, keep Canada at the forefront of innovative health research and save lives down the road.
At Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, work to develop better ways of delivering radiation in cancer therapy or of using ultrasound to treat brain disorders like depression will be able to quickly continue once restrictions on non-essential work are lifted.
“This is a significant lifeline,” said Dr. Andy Smith, head of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. He said the alternative would have been disastrous for Canada’s health research community.
Already at least one research institute in Canada has had to euthanize research animals, though Smith said Sunnybrook had assigned a skeleton crew to look after its mice and small rodents.
Shuttering the health research institutes — which are not funded by hospital or provincial health budgets — would have affected projects, often years in development, including some which get spun off into start-up companies and would have “severely eroded the momentum in our knowledge economy,” he added.
Across Canada, nearly all research and clinical trials unrelated to coronavirus were suspended or cancelled in midMarch because of the COVID-19 shutdown.
That included a halt to more than 600 cancer trials and all kinds of experimental research into diseases like diabetes, Alzheimers and heart disease that kill the majority of Canadians.
And as outside sources of funding for the research dried up, health researchers, biostatisticians, research nurses, lab technicians and others didn’t qualify for federal aid and their lab operations faced closures.
It threatened ongoing experimental projects, and leaders such as those at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children saw talent slipping away.
Dr. Ronald Cohn, president and CEO SickKids, said he’d already lost out on hiring a promising young scientist who took a job in another country which could offer her a contract while Canada’s research environment was in limbo.
“There was a real risk” to the future of Canada’s health research community, said Cohn.
Ottawa’s announcement Friday, he said, “is really a significant support I think that will get us through this.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the federal government would provide $450 million in temporary wage support to the health research institutes to weather the shutdown.
Like the wage subsidy, the federal funding will provide up to 75 per cent per individual, with a maximum of $847 per week. And the federal government will also provide up to 75 per cent of eligible costs to allow the health research centres to maintain essential activities during the crisis, and to ramp back up to full research operations once physical distancing measures are lifted.
The money will come through block grants via three federal funding agencies, to support activities such as the safe storage of dangerous substances and restarting data sets that were interrupted during the pandemic, and top hospital research directors said that is the swiftest way to get money where it’s needed.
“We applaud the federal government for providing urgently needed financial support to help Canada’s over 50,000 hospital-based biomedical researchers,” said Dr. Brad Wouters, executive vice-president of science and research at University Health Network in Toronto
He said the money will “help stabilize critical on-going research … even while we battle the COVID-19 virus.”
HealthCareCAN, the association which represents more than 55 of the top hospitals and health centres, said Canada’s research community risked becoming a casualty of the pandemic, and welcomed Friday’s announcement.