Article Type: Generic

Health Canada has taken the lead in implementing a key plank of the 1999 SAGE report with the appointment of Dr Kevin Keough as its chief scientist. Keough, Memorial Univ’s VP research and international relations, will take up the newly created post April 2 by taking a three-year executive interchange that could stretch to five years.

Statistics Canada has implemented the first phase of a major overhaul of the method used for gauging R&D spending in the higher education sector, with its latest survey capturing a much higher level of expenditures than ever before.

Canada’s spending on R&D is increasing at a respectable clip but the economy is growing even faster, pushing down the key ratio of gross expenditures on R&D (GERD) and gross domestic product (GDP). The impact of a rapidly expanding GDP leaves the ranking of Canada’s R&D spending mired near the bottom of OECD nations and will make Finance minister Paul Martin’s goal of moving into the top five by 2010 even more difficult to achieve (R$, October 2/00).

If Ontario-based medical sciences are discounted, there isn’t a whole lot of R&D left to count in Canada’s private, non-profit (PNP) sector. That’s the picture created by Statistics Canada’s latest data on the sector, which show that medical sciences conducted by research institutes comprise the bulk of sectoral spending, with the vast majority conducted in Ontario.

The Ontario government has created a non-profit company to take over the administration of its two largest R&D funds and has appointed a former DM to run the show. The Innovation Institute of Ontario (IIO) has been established as a subsidiary of the Ontario Innovation Trust (OIT), the arm’s length agency responsible for providing matching funds to universities and institutes that secure federal infrastructure support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

CMDF hikes provincial credit by 5 per cent
The Canadian Medical Discoveries Fund (CMDF) has been given a new incentive to attract investment courtesy of a new tax credit introduced last fall by the Ontario government.

Ontario government invests $50 M in cancer research
The Ontario government has accepted the recommendations of a working group led by Dr Calvin Stiller and is investing $50 million in cancer research through the new Ontario Cancer Research Network.

After just six months of operation, the structure and direction of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has taken a giant leap forward with the appointment of 13 scientific directors (SDs) to head up its fledgling Institutes.

The eMPOWR Canada campaign to stimulate the pipeline of graduates in strategic communications technologies sectors has beefed up its case for nearly $500 million in new federal funding, with the release of a double survey on industry and university needs.

Canada must develop a national genomics strategy and dramatically increase its investment in the field to ensure a place in the post-human genome world of proteomics, sequencing and functional genomics.