Stephen Harper and the knowledge economy: perfect strangers

This story will get buried by all the other news today. That’s understandable, but I wish it weren’t so. It’s about a long-term government failure.

In 2007 Maxime Bernier created the Science, Technology and Innovation Council to measure Canada’s science and technology performance against that of comparable countries around the world. It’s produced reports every two years. The latest was released this morning while most of us were caught up in some other hilarity on the Hill.

Knowledge: The Best Return on Investment

On the perils of the trickle-down economics philosophy now driving Canada's scientific-funding model.


A recent editorial in Nature condemns the Canadian government’s media protocols for severely limiting what federal scientists can freely communicate to the general public. The criticisms are well-founded. To put it mildly, the current federal government has a “poor record on openness.”

But the problem for science in Canada extends far beyond the introduction of overt limits on “public access to publicly funded scientific expertise.” More worrisome is the now-dominant philosophy of trickle-down economics that drives science funding in this country.

Trickle-down economics for science presumes that commercialized science benefits society by improving the economy. This philosophy now shapes Canadian science in a number of troublesome ways. Research is not about knowledge production, but about the “knowledge economy” and the “delivery of tangible and measurable results” to create a “prosperous and resilient” economy. Our scientists are not so much engaged in developing a research agenda as in contributing to the “research enterprise.” In this context, it is easy to denigrate basic science, sometimes described as “blue sky” science, because it does not aim to create new products, new services, or new jobs.