It’s time Canada woke up to the indirect costs of an innovation agenda

Universities are one of the largest buyers of telecommunications services in Canada, and with their rapid rollout of broadband networks, have become an important test bed for advanced content and applications. But as the federal government pushes ahead with its renewed focus on innovation, Canadian universities are warning that their R&D contribution will be undermined unless the feds make more money available for research infrastructure, including telecommunications networks. Bruce Hutchison, past president of the Canadian Association of University Research Administrators, appeared before the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology May 15 to stress the importance of funding the indirect costs of performing research. An edited excerpt from his presentation appears as follows: It is clear to those of us on the ground, that increased research activity leads to the need for increased expenditures in library and information sources for professors and their students, increases in information technology infrastructure, in human resource departments, and other indirect costs…. While we have welcomed the new programs for support of research like CFI (Canadian Foundation for Innovation), the Canada research chairs program, Genome Canada, and the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Studies, they bring a new administrative burden, which costs those institutions that apply real dollars…. We will not be on a level playing field with our major adjacent competitor until the issue of indirect costs is met. Our universities and research institutes across the country have a significant role to play in the innovation agenda. We need to be equipped to do the job. Provision of indirect costs will allow universities to upgrade their information technology services for transfer of research data and to take advantage of the high-speed communication links between institutions; to upgrade animal facilities; to provide for safe, high-quality animal care for assessment of new treatment methodologies; to provide better support for human ethics reviews; and to provide the administrative support for more rapid uptake of approved projects. In addition, information on library resources for researchers will be able to be adequately supported. That is the kind of equipping universities and their research institutes need to be competitive. While the new programs I’ve mentioned above are an essential contribution to the innovation agenda, these programs, and the major renewal of faculty required over the next ten years, will put an incredible amount of pressure on the granting councils for support of research. Granting council funding is the engine on which other, more applied, programs are built. For the universities and research institutes to be successful in recruiting internationally for the research staff we will need, we must have a research environment that will support their basic research. If we don’t increase this funding, we’re simply not going to have enough high-quality people we need to train the increasingly sophisticated workforce Canada needs and to provide the next wave of professors we need in our institutions. This will require major increases in granting council funding…. To meet the government’s goal to move from fifteenth to fifth in terms of gross expenditure on research and development, we have to build a lot of capacity in Canada. Building capacity in universities is a time-consuming and people-intensive business… But I can report to you that there’s a real air of excitement amongst the researchers at our universities because of the increased opportunities to become internationally competitive that these new programs have unleashed. To sustain this excitement, we know, as research administrators, that we need to provide the institutional infrastructure to support our research leaders and the new people we need to hire.

It’s time Canada woke up to the indirect costs of an innovation agenda

News | June 4, 2001

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