Canadian Science: Divide and Conquer?

So what's the story with the federal "war on science"?  We've had much agitation over the last few years about cutbacks to science: closing labs (like the Experimental Lakes Area, but many other programs and centres as well, including libraries), firing federal scientists, discouraging evidence-based health and environmental law and policy.  Here's a recent update by Andrew Nikiforuk, and a new report, "Vanishing Science" by the Professional Institute of Public Service of Canada. 

But reaction to this week's federal budget says something else, summarized by this headline: "Postsecondary leaders hail federal budget's new research cash".  University presidents are excited about, among other things, a new Canada First Research Excellence Fund, and more-or-less stable funding for the granting councils, NSERC and SSHRC.

These contradictory impressions bring into focus the current shift in federal science policy.  For sure, the notion of a generalized "war on science" is inaccurate (as, for example, Alex Usher of HESA noted recently).  Support for academic research has actually been fairly stable over the last several years.  And even though an increasing fraction of that support is tied to industry, there is still a great deal of funding available for basic science, and even social sciences and humanities, unconnected to any potential economic spinoffs.  (After serving on and chairing a SSHRC adjudication panel for the last several years, I would certainly say that our committee never felt that decisions had to be made on anything other than academic grounds.)

But what is being cut is almost any government role in science beyond that of paying the bills.  In the environmental field, the impact is on the government's own research and monitoring capacity, its capacity to facilitate research by others (through its libraries and field research stations), and its ability to ensure that scientific knowledge will be applied to policy and environmental protection.  These capacities were built up over the last 45 years (beginning with the expansion in government environmental science capacity in the late 1960s), and so their elimination is historically significant.  They can't be replaced by academic research � if the government doesn't do this stuff, nobody does.

It seems unfortunate that academic leaders will applaud a research policy because it is OK for their own institutions, even though the larger picture is of an erosion of some of the essential social functions of science.