Why funding infrastructure is so important

Q: What did the landscape of Ontario research look like in the 1990s before OIT and the Canada Foundation for Innovation funding arrived?

It was a low-lying terrain with a small number of exceptional spikes of excellence. But those spikes were very narrow and very steep and not connected in any way.

Why?

What you had across the country was, by and large, individuals and institutions working primarily by themselves, for themselves. We were a nation politically but we didn't view ourselves functioning as a nation scientifically. Then CFI came along and encouraged institutions to think less parochially, to believe that "multidisciplinary" and "multicentre" weren't dirty hyphenated words. And the requirement for the matching of CFI grants pushed the provinces into becoming actively involved in funding science.

What did that change do to the spiky research landscape?

For one thing, the provinces moved from what was essentially a passive role of covering the overhead costs of institutions to one in which they were drawn into setting priorities and approving applications when it came to large grants. What they realized was that, understandably, the federal government didn't understand all the provinces' needs and concerns. Provinces wanted to be seated at the table where research agendas were being decided and, through institutions like OIT, they could be.

That sounds like a classic arena for Canadian federal/provincial conflicts.

I wouldn't say conflicts. It was more like creative tension. There was a realization that the provinces understood local needs and strategic fit with provincial plans and priority.

What kind of changes followed from this creative tension?

To start with, the provinces realized that the CFI collaborative/interdisciplinary model was one they agreed with. They too wanted their institutions to become more connected, so the research landscape, in every province and across the country, started to look less like individual stands of trees and more like a forest of discovery. Something else that occurred was that everyone - even the most pure gold, "government should keep its hands off research direction" types of scientists - began to realize that building world-class infrastructures empowered them. This subsequently altered how Canadian scientists viewed themselves in global terms.

How so?

To be frank, in the past the aspiration wasn't very high. To be the best in Canada was a big "wow." Now that is gone. The game no longer is to be the best in Canada because "best" now means absolute best - the best in the world. And that feeds into where industries want to make their investments. It's global quality they are looking for in establishing a technology presence. Narrow research nationalism that was prevalent before CFI and OIT simply doesn't fit with their world-view.

Where do we go from here?

My sense is that the future will see more and more collaborative research, particularly in health sciences and energy. That will demand more shared technologies and facilities to ensure we keep up with technological change in a world where India and China and Brazil are becoming major players. In my view, in many research fields in the future, only the big trees and big forests will prosper. And the collaborative impulse we established in the 1990s will need to be continually nourished to foster future growth.