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.

I will acknowledge that, as a country, we have an interest in investing in industry sectors where there’s a potential for high growth and where releasing proprietary secrets can be counter productive. That might make sense for research topics like:

• Algebraic Techniques for Quantum Security

• Novel radiopharmaceuticals to cure cancer

• Probing Novel Molecular Designs for Organic Excitonic Superconductors

But I really don’t know how much of a competitive advantage there might be in withholding the results of:

• A Tactical Urbanism approach to assessing the value of accessible public spaces

• Accessible Technology for Canadians with Cognitive Disabilities: Closing the Digital Gap

• Future-proofing young Canadians with disabilities for the changing labour market

And are we really expected to happily sign-off on quarter million dollar, sight unseen payouts for:

• Paleoproteomics: A new frontier in the study of Indigenous plant use in the Americas

• Reimagining Inclusion from the Margins: Transforming Sport Access and Equity.

• The UBC Housing and Well-Being Project

• Wireless probes for subglacial analyses of surging glaciers

I know what you’re thinking: it’s only a half billion dollars. Stacked up against the galactic scale of everyday government waste, this one hardly counts. Except that there are, no doubt, a lot more “this ones”. And pushing back against even one could send a message that we’d appreciate at least a measure of accountability.

Perhaps all those studies really did deliver fantastic value. But we’ll never know. And I think that’s a problem.