It must seem unfair to the United Conservative Party (UCP) base that flat-earth researchers consistently get the short end of the stick when it comes to federal research funds while the spherical-earth crowd so obviously favoured by Ottawa gets all the dough!
As Premier Danielle Smith told CBC Power & Politics host David Cochrane last week, “I have been given enough indication that the federal government uses its power through researchers to only fund certain types of opinion, certain types of researchers, and I don’t think that’s fair.”
Where she got this idea is an interesting question, since, as Cochrane accurately responded to her, “the national research councils are de-politicized, right? It’s a jury of academics, or peer reviewed, and they make the decisions through the application on research grants going to university. And it’s all posted publicly, so you can see what’s there.”
Are you saying, Cochrane asked a little plaintively, that “you don’t have confidence in that system?”
The former talk radio host known for her enthusiasm for quack COVID cures has no time for peer review. Alberta’s premier will be blundering ahead with her latest spectacularly bad policy, part of a package of new red-tape measures contained in Bill 18, the so-called Provincial Priorities Act, if for no other reason than it’s an opportunity for Alberta’s UCP government to try to own the Libs, which seems to be its sole raison d’être nowadays.
Actually, there is no serious evidence that the Trudeau government or any other recent Canadian government has made any effort to interfere with the work of the three federal academic research granting agencies, the Canadian Institute for Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
Still, it’s not very hard to figure out where Smith most likely got the idea. “I have heard enough from some of our academics about how difficult it can be to be able to access some of that funding,” she told Cochrane.
Which academics, you wonder? Cast your minds back to 2017 and you will probably find the answer. That was when Jordan Peterson, Canada’s contribution to the incel movement, complained he’d been denied a grant by the SSHRC, claiming it was linked to his vociferous attacks on the right to choose your own pronouns.
Alert readers will recall that Smith recently shared a stage with Peterson and other prominent right-wing figures at a Calgary event hosted by Tucker Carlson, the American commentator canned by Fox News executives for being too extreme even for their tastes.
It’s not a stretch to conclude that was the extent of her research into research.
Nevertheless, one wonders if anyone in the UCP’s strategic brain trust has any clue just how complex a task they are proposing to take on.
“The university has to sign off on every application before it goes in,” explained University of Calgary political science professor Lisa Young in response to a query.
Universities take on the massive job of administering research to ensure their scarce resources aren’t overstretched, a huge issue where lab space is required, that the funds are spent appropriately, and that ethical rules are observed, she said.
“If I get a SSHRC grant, it’s held by the university on my behalf,” said Dr. Young. “The university’s research accountants make sure that I spend the money according to tri-council rules. This is a huge job, and the tri-agencies don’t want to take it on directly – they don’t have the capacity to make sure that researchers’ travel claims follow the rules, and that purchasing was done properly, and that graduate students were paid at approved rates and so on.”
She continued: “The universities are also responsible for making sure that researchers comply with other tri-council rules: that we have ethics approval when we’re doing research with human subjects, that we don’t fabricate data or results, and that we follow all of the appropriate practices around animal care.”
“Research universities have huge bureaucracies to ensure compliance with these rules,” she concluded, including “ethics committees, specialized veterinarians, and an army of accounting clerks!”
For this reason, students applying for the tri-councils’ prestigious scholarships, must also apply through the institutions at which they study.
Typically, universities go through all graduate students’ applications and select those that have the best chances of successfully receiving federal funding.
The Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of Alberta, for example, also looks at what projects will benefit the institution’s research profile. Often a major factor in the arts is the idea that the research is novel or new. “Conservative research” reaching back to an idealized past that never really existed and contradicts the way things are now just might have trouble getting approval.
Unlike the feds, the Alberta government funds essentially zero research in the arts or critical analysis.
Be that as it may, it is worth wondering if the claque now running the UCP understands any of this. The answer, it would seem, is obviously not.
How is the work going to get done in time to meet the funding agencies’ time limits? The short answer is that it most likely won’t. It’s also quite likely that the Smith government’s brain trust simply doesn’t care.
Despite her rhetoric about the need for an environment in which “all people from all political perspectives are able to engage in a robust debate and have a robust research agenda,” what Smith has in mind is a truly politicized research funding process that suppresses anything that might demonstrate politically unpalatable truths. Such as, for example, the fact Earth’s atmosphere is growing hotter.
It’s hard to imagine the Smith government funding research like the Corporate Mapping Project, an academic study of concentrated power and influence in Canada’s fossil fuel industry, that was funded by a $2.3-million SSHRC grant approved on prime minister Stephen Harper’s watch in 2015.
It seems quite possible the party controlled by Take Back Alberta has a plan to Take Back Science.
NOTE: It’s always useful to see what Smith has to say set out in writing, where the false equivalents, non-sequiturs, conspiratorial thinking, and dubious claims stand out more clearly than when one is listening to her cheerfully bloviate in a news conference. Accordingly, here is a transcript of the key passage from Smith’s Power & Politics interview that has been circulating on social media. DJC
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