Universities as Institutions of Research

In my daily traipsing across the world of internet news, I came across two articles touching on the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI).

Article 1: Preston Manning, writing for The CFI's online magazine, shares some thoughts on the National Institute of Nanotechnology at the University of Alberta and what the future of research and innovation funding might look like in Canada.

Article 2: Apparently, today marks the end of funding for the CFI. As the article says: "The key federal program supporting world-class scientific research facilities in Canada will effectively run out of money today, leaving universities worried and the Harper government in a quandary."

Paul Wells points out some of the impressive impact the CFI has had since it was created by the Chretien government in 1997 as part of a national research and innovation strategy. Paul is my Canadian journalist of choice on issues of research, innovation and the knowledge economy. His summary of the end of the CFI:

The possible end of the CFI is not a crisis, but it imposes a mandate on governments to do some serious thinking about what happens next. The Harper government really is doing a re-think of its science and technology policy. Its early steps, revealed in Jim Flaherty's fall economic update, are not entirely discouraging. But getting this policy right will be extraordinarily important.

A couple of thoughts: If you look at how universities spend money, they are not primarily educational institutions. The real focus at major Canadian Universities is engaging in research. One of the things that the Chretien government did in the second half of its mandate (which became a major piece of the legacy), was to take research and innovation seriously and to establish some innovative approaches to supporting it. The CFI and the Canada Research Chairs program are two examples.

Now that the Harper government is being given an opportunity to pick up the baton, it remains to be seen whether the ideological thrust of Harper's caucus will leave the federal government creating a funding void in anticipation of "private sector investment." Harper is a smart enough policy wonk to recognise that abandoning the research sector to corporate sponsors would verge on idiocy and that the preferred ideological solution in this case is a bad one.

In the meantime, I'm still a university student and I care about the education function for our universities. Can we please get around to creating a dedicated federal education transfer and eventually perhaps to establishing national benchmarks negotiated amongst the provinces? It would be nice if Canadian students selecting a university might be encouraged to leave their home province. Perhaps if more Canadians studied in regions of the country they didn't grow up in, when they hit middle age they wouldn't assume that voters in every region of the country should behave exactly like their next door neighbour.

And while I'm at it, perhaps that dedicated educational transfer might contain stipulations regarding and funding for establishing bilingualism at the post-secondary educational level. If some of our bilingual graduates could study outside Quebec, then perhaps thirty years from now idiocy like the "nation" debate of the last 6 weeks could be conducted with some maturity. I know it's a lot to ask, but it would only require some leadership.

So there! Rant finished.