Thursday, January 29, 2009

At Least We’ll Have Nice Shiny Labs

I read this morning that there seems to be a hole in the budget where the Genome Canada funding used to be. This is just another budget issue that really gets my goat. At a time when I believe we need to build our “knowledge based economy”, the Tories seem to have taken away hundreds of millions of important funding dollars to Canadian researchers while at the same time sending money flowing to universities for upgrading labs.

In fairness, it should be noted that they have increased funding for NSERC, CIHR and SSHRC, to the tune of $87.5million, which is good. BUT, that increase is far less then has been lost by Genome Canada. The net effect being that researchers are going to fight even harder for money, money that isn’t exactly easy for even top researchers to get right now given that donations to universities and other funding agencies are drying up a fast pace.

Maybe its just me, but it seems counter-productive to fund new and spruced up labs while at the same time cutting funding for the people inside those labs. What’s the point of having new labs if researchers don’t have the funding to use them?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Note that all of the new SSHRC funding is being directed toward "business-related degrees". Why should the taxpayer pay people to do MBAs?