New Centres program remains in flux

Oversight and management of the recently minted Centres of Excellence in Commercialization and Research program remains in flux.

The federal government hasn't yet determined which agency will administer the program, although nearly a month as passed since the $350 million initiative was unveiled in Finance minister Jim Flaherty's Mar. 19 budget.

“No decision has been taken” as to who will oversee the program, said Jean-Claude Gavrel, director of the existing 15-year-old tri-council Networks of Centres of Excellence program, which Finance officials said would likely be vested with responsibility for administering the new pool of research monies.

Under the initiative, some $195 million was set aside for a competition next year to create an unspecified number of centres in unspecified areas, although the government indicated it wanted the monies invested in fields in which “Canada has the potential to be a world leader, such as energy, environmental technologies and health sciences.”

But in a move designed to establish what government officials called “proof of concept,” Flaherty provided $15 million apiece to 7 existing institutes to help them ramp up operations, develop critical mass and devise research plans that bolstered their chances of success in the forthcoming competition (see editorial, page 1389).

The 7 recipients, selected by Finance and Industry officials, were the Brain Research Centre at the University of British Columbia, the Canada School of Sustainable Energy at the universities of Alberta, Calgary and Lethbridge, the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at the University of Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital, the Heart and Stroke Foundation Centre for Stroke Recovery affiliated with the universities of Toronto and Ottawa, the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University, the National Optics Institute in Quebec City and the Life Science Research Institute affiliated with Dalhousie University in Halifax.

An eighth institute, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, received $50 million, although its research program was peer reviewed and received glowing recommendations from an international panel, which urged that its original $25 million/5 year federal award be renewed.

Critics, including Dr. Ronald Worton, chair of the new advocacy group Research Canada: An Alliance for Health Discovery, and CEO and scientific director of the Ottawa Health Research Institute, charged that the awarding of funds to the 7 institutes without benefit of scientific input and peer review constituted a “dangerous” precedent.

Other details of the new program remain sparse. Federal officials have indicated that applicants in the forthcoming competition will have to meet a matching dollar requirement to be eligible for funding. That requirement will apparently be stiffer for centres that focus on commercialization than for those which focus on research. But the scope of that difference has yet to be established.