Canada’s move to protect research from hostile states will arguably spur negative unintended consequences and fail to substantively address its stated goal.
Creso Sá is a distinguished professor of science policy, higher education and innovation, and vice-dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.
While STRAC’s lists regulates eligibility to federal funding, we now have officially designated research institutions deemed to be hostile actors by the federal government. The broader impacts of this to academic exchange and Canada’s ability to continuously benefit from “brain gain” cannot be underestimated.
One might argue that unintended consequences notwithstanding, the policy has a clear rationale to protect Canada’s national interests. However, that would assume thatConsider that Canada has consistently failed to keep up with investments in R&D and that the federal government has never gotten close to addressing research funding shortages identified in the 2017 and 2023 reviews it commissioned.