Canada's NRC outgrowing budget

The Canadian federal government's financial watchdog told Parliament last week that the National Research Council of Canada (NRC)—a CAN $800-million-a-year (USD $611 million) agency—is in danger of outgrowing its financial resources. Sheila Fraser, the auditor general, also said that the NRC needed “stronger governance and improved priority setting” and noted “with concern” that “the council's research activities are expanding faster than its financial capacity to sustain them.” In addition, the auditor general told reporters, “NRC's Governing Council… provides no effective challenge to management plans and decisions to ensure that the council's research activities continue to be sustainable.” Its biggest challenge, her report said, is for the NRC to “review its corporate mechanisms for setting priorities to avoid an imbalance between its research activities and available funding. Although it has had no core budget increase, it is currently launching several long-term initiatives that include major increases in infrastructure and staff.” The NRC “generally followed good practices for developing its vision, which is closely aligned with the federal government's 1996 science and technology strategy and its 2002 innovation strategy,” Fraser said, but “continues to expand the scope of its research activities and infrastructure, despite a lack of core budget increase.” Fraser recommended, among other things, that NRC's Governing Council should define its role and put in place necessary governance mechanisms and review the its corporate senior management structure. The NRC “has accepted and agreed with all our recommendations,” Fraser noted, with responses to her recommendations included in the report. The NRC secretary general, Pat Mortimer, said in a broadcast interview that the council has known all along it would have to make a good case for continued funding. “This is not new for us, we're not concerned,” said Mortimer. “When the time comes to make a decision for the government to renew that funding, we'll be in a good position to make a case.” The report was released just as Arthur J. Carty, the then-president of the NRC, was stepping down to become the national science advisor to the prime minister. Michael Raymont, who had been vice president for technology and industry support, became interim president. An NRC spokesperson, responding to queries from The Scientist, supplied a comment from Carty: “We do recognize… that the NRC over the last 10 years has undergone some quite dramatic changes, and we accept the challenge that it might be time to update, for example, our corporate governance and management systems to match the exciting and dynamic environment we've created here. So, we find the auditor general's comments useful, and we'll work to implement the key recommendations.” However, Carty said, the government must take into account that the problem of maintaining infrastructure needs to be tackled. David Thomas, director of the Royal Society of Canada's Life Sciences Executive Committee, told The Scientist that the NRC has to find a new role. “It's trying to do too much with too few resources,” said Thomas, who chairs McGill University's Biochemistry Department. “Unlike the National Research Council in the US, the NRC continues to do in-house research.” “Most of the people at the NRC are good, but they have to spend too much of their time doing bureaucratic stuff, since they're being driven to seek funds from outside to supplement their work, from CIHR [Canadian Institutes of Health Research] and from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada,” Thomas said. The NRC also suffers, he said, from “lots and lots of politically driven expansion. They've established institutions, but can't afford to turn the lights on. Financial resources don't always follow political need.” Thomas cited the recent establishment of the national nanotechnology center. “The bulk of the research is in Quebec, but the NRC put the center in Edmonton. Science and the logical process,” he said, “have been subsumed by political need.”

Canada's NRC outgrowing budget

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