Ottawa, Canadian destination of knowledge ” from Canadian Chat
Ottawa hosts this month, two mégacongrès involving some 13 000 researchers across Canada and many foreign countries.
The first of these congresses, the ACFAS, the Association francophone pour le savoir, begins today at the University of Ottawa. It will last all week. The second is the Canadian Federation of Human Sciences, will be held at Carleton University from 23 to 31 May
This alignment of the stars scientists (notice to those who read me in the first degree is a picture, I did not put in astrology!), This alignment of the stars, therefore, led the host city to declare itself “Canadian destination of knowledge” for the month of May. It is thus stressed that “academic research is essential to ensure the prosperity and quality of life for all Canadians.”
Less money
Wonderful! But we should not forget that two steps of the University of Ottawa, a government office, the Conservatives, just send a negative message to the scientific community.
Even if he has added some funds for scholarships for graduate students, it has imposed budget cuts of up to 5% in the three councils to distribute federal funds to researchers, the CIHR (Canadian Institutes of Health Research ), NSERC (the Natural Sciences and Engineering) and SSHRC (the Social Sciences and Humanities).
However, these organizations are the main sources of funding for university research. It is with their dollars that pay salaries, equipment and other expenses. Of course, we continue to invest in concrete and equipment, and necessary. But if you have one to use is like leaving the car in the garage, because you can not pay the full.
Knowledge society?
The Canadian university community, usually quiet, seems to want to mobilize against what it perceives as a reduced sensitivity of the current government to the needs and requirements of research. It is such claims that, unlike what happens here, the government of our neighbors chose to invest heavily in research.
The annual budget of the National Institutes of Health U.S., which already exceeds 30 billion U.S. dollars, increase by 1.5% in 2010 to almost 31 billion.
And we must add to this, do you well, the tidy sum of 10.4 billion allocated to NIH under the recent ARRA, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The budget of the NSF, the National Science Foundation, he will have increased by 16% from 2008 to 2010.
Add to that two points. We saw recently that the heart of the Federal Minister for Science, Gary Goodyear, balance between Darwinism and creationism. The same Conservative government appointed “climatological skeptics in organizations such as NSERC and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (the” climatological skeptics “are part of this small minority of scientists who question the fact climate change).
Add these two points and you will understand that the scientific community may have difficulty believing that Ottawa is truly Canada’s capital of science.
As was said this morning the president of the ACFAS, Pierre Noreau, it must choose, one is either a knowledge society, a society of ignorance. “
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