Maggie Macintosh, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Winnipeg Free Press
University of Manitoba scientists are recruiting colleagues on campuses across the country to put pressure on Canada’s next prime minister to prioritize funding research amid an “international innovation vacuum.”
A team of local professors has drafted an open letter to federal party leaders to warn about the fallout of restrictions on scientific research, sweeping layoffs and program cancellations in the United States.
“Canada must act — to protect our own scientific capacity, and to start filling the void that has been created in global science leadership and innovation,” they wrote.
Their memo urges the next federal government to remove a cap on international students and establish a “research accelerator fund” to match and incentivize provincial, business and non-profit donations.
It also calls for doubling dollars set aside for Ottawa’s Tri-Council agencies that fund research related to health, the humanities and natural sciences and engineering.
Aleeza Gerstein, an associate professor of microbiology at U of M, said she is waiting for leadership hopefuls to weigh in on the subject ahead of the April 28 election.
“We are not meeting our potential,” Gerstein said Monday.
Canada spent 1.8 per cent of its total GDP on research and development in 2023, per the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The OECD average was 2.7 per cent. It was 3.4 per cent in the U.S.
“Our research funding is really low. It’s not kept pace with the world and we don’t have enough funding in the system to support the people who are here already,” Gerstein noted.
More than 500 researchers had endorsed her and her colleagues’ calls to action for Ottawa — which were published in English and French over the weekend — by midday Monday.
The signatories work at post-secondary institutes from coast to coast, including Halifax-based Dalhousie University and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Despite being in different countries, Canadian and American researchers often publish articles together and build “shared systems of discovery,” which are now under attack, their letter states.
Canadian scholars have long leveraged these partnerships because their American colleagues are willing to lend a hand and have access to far larger grants than they do, Gerstein said.
“A lot of us have come to rely on our American colleagues,” she said, noting the future of that support is uncertain.
Gerstein recently abandoned a grant application that she’d planned to complete with a U.S. collaborator because of the political landscape.
U.S. President Donald Trump has cancelled billions of dollars in foreign aid and limited the scope of what projects can be funded, among numerous related actions, since he returned to the White House in January.
Julie Lajoie reviewed all of her successful grant applications over the last year and found 25 terms that are now on a banned list, owing to the Trump administration’s rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Among them? Women. Elderly. Health equity.
“If I were a U.S. researcher, my program would be shutting down,” said the assistant professor at U of M who studies global infectious diseases.
Lajoie’s research team runs clinics in Kenya that deliver services in reproductive health, tuberculosis, sexually transmitted infection and HIV. The clinics are “in the grey zone,” amid funding uncertainty, she said.
The deterioration of a global research leader presents an opportunity for Canada to invest more in local scientific inquiry, which will, in turn, attract more funding and jobs, Lajoie said.
She added: “Let’s take the space that U.S. had as a public health and research leader.”
Many of the signatories of the national letter have also signed a new petition calling on the Manitoba government to top up research funding and capitalize on brain drain in the U.S.
maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca
