Our Government Sponsors "Transformative" Research

Or does it? And is there any way to know for sure?

Between 2018 and 2022, the federal government’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) paid out 527 million dollars to 6,122 researchers engaged in 880 research projects. The NFRF exists to support:

“World-leading interdisciplinary, international, high-risk / high-reward, transformative and rapid-response Canadian-led research.”

880 research projects! I was hopeful that exploring those projects could offer us a useful window into the government’s research priorities and measurable achievements. I imagined that this could tell us a lot about what the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Industry has been up to all these years.

I figured that I’d access at least some of the published papers and assess them for methodological quality using the powerful Consenus GPT AI research assistant. Consensus is particularly good at identifying methodological weaknesses in papers, including:

• Failure to control for confounding variables

• Smaller datasets and sample size concerns

• Integration of diverse data sources

• Longitudinal follow-up and attrition

• Causality vs association

Sadly, the idea was dead on arrival. You see, even though NFRF insists that:

“Recipients are expected to publicly acknowledge their NFRF support in various forms of communication”

…there’s no requirement that they make their research public.

We do have access to the research topics, the key team members, and brief summaries of their plans. But that’s it. Despite the fact that our taxes paid up to $250,000 for each project, few (if any) of them are publicly available. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to know for sure that the research even happened.

Nothing says transparency like preventing your funders from seeing what you’ve done.