CIHR chair stumps for budget cuts
In a news release on CIHR’s website last week, CIHR president Alain Beaudet defended the Conservative budget cuts to research funding, albeit with muted enthusiasm. He repeated the government’s insistence that they have supported CIHR in the past, and trumpeted the increase in graduate student funding. He also soft-pedals the cuts, especially to the popular Open Team Grant funding program. In a bit of disingenuousness, he points out that if the graduate scholarships are considered, then CIHR’s funding will increase by $12.5-million in 2009-10. First, funding students doesn’t accomplish much if the researchers who would employ them don’t have operating grants. Second, the CIHR funding cuts are heavily weighted to the end of the three-year budget plan, and so the real damage to research funding isn’t projected to be in 2010, but in 2012.
Looks like the Government has felt the heat from the negative coverage of the research funding cuts, and is working to get its people onside.
