Mulroney made the announcement to 200 business and university leaders last month in Toronto at a federally sponsored conference called to solicit their advice or developing a new national science and technology strategy.
A portion of the funds Will help establish a program of centers of excellence on Canadian university campuses and a system of scholarships in science, engineering and related disciplines for some 2,500 undergraduates each year.
Skeptics have suggested that the bulk of the money Will be spent only if the prime minister's Progressive Conservative government is re-elected. An election must be held by September 1989. They also pointed out that Mulroney has not kept his promise to double what was referred to as collective spending on R&D as a proportion of GNP When the promise was made, six months before his party won a landslide election victory in September 1984, R&D spending stood at 1.3 percent of ...
