Luring excellence to Canada

Canada’s 2008 budget includes two programs to recruit top scientists from around the world. In one, 20 awards each totaling Can$10 million (US$9.8 million) over seven years will go to universities that attract premier researchers. These Canada Global Excellence Research Chairs will be in the areas of health, environment, natural resources and energy, and information and communication technologies. In the other, 500 graduate students a year will win Vanier scholarships, each worth Can$50 000 a year for three years. Industry Canada, the ministry that oversees most physical sciences research, compares the intended prestige of these new internationally competitive scholarships to Rhodes and Fulbright grants in the UK and US, respectively.

“The government wants to up the ante on world-class excellence. They don’t want to simply spread the money around,” says Indira Samarasekera, president of the University of Alberta in Edmonton. “We will immediately get our faculty to identify people around the world, Canadians living abroad and others,” to sponsor for global chairs, she says, “and we will look at committing resources of our own.” Thanks to oil, Alberta is a prosperous province, she adds. “We have a Can$400 million science building under construction, and a lot of other new buildings. We will use that as a hook in competing against other universities.”

The global chairs and the Vanier graduate grants are aligned with Canada’s science and technology strategy, which was outlined in a May 2007 report, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage.