The government’s partnership with private sector investors has been a boon for the research effort, the head of Agriculture Canada’s research branch said last week.
Brian Morrissey told the House of Commons agriculture committee the government provided enough funds last year to employ approximately 2,000 full-time research personnel.
Instead, there were 4,500 people working in labs, most of them on projects funded in part by private funds matched by government dollars.
“That’s about double the hands doing research in Canada,” Morrissey said May 13.
They were taking advantage of the Matching Investment Initiative, which sees Ottawa match up to $35 million in private investment commitments.
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But there is a price to pay. Private investors have more say over what is researched and ownership of the resulting discoveries sometimes is shared, depending on the contractual arrangement.
“To get those extra hands, we have had to give up some crown rights,” said Morrissey.
In recent weeks, the agriculture committee has heard from agriculture college deans that while the private dollars are welcome, they have biased the research effort toward short-term projects and have masked the effects of a decline in public spending on research facilities and long-term basic research.
Reform agriculture critic Howard Hilstrom told Morrissey he should not accept that the government cannot provide enough money to pay for all the basic research required.
The Reform MP noted a news story last week that the Canada Council had spent more than $50,000 to help finance an erotic movie called Bubbles Galore, a movie that Reformers insisted was pornography.
“Don’t ever let them say there’s not enough money to do all the research we need,” said Hilstrom.
“We’ve had Bubbles Galore for $55,000. We don’t need private funding to do what has to be done (in research).”
Meanwhile, Morrissey said that researchers have created a new Canada Prairie Spring wheat variety that is more resistant to fusarium head blight.
He said the variety, which will be released next year, will help battle the $60 million in losses to fusarium suffered each year by prairie farmers.
Manitoba Conservative Rick Borotsik insisted the loss is closer to $70 million and he complained that the government could have helped earlier by providing emergency registration of the chemical Folicur, which is available to producers in the United States.
