A year and a half ago, Canada was celebrating a reversal of the perpetual brain drain it had felt for decades. Thanks mostly to a few key government investments in the late 1990s, most of this last decade saw hundreds of formerly wayward Canadian academics repatriated, doctoral students staying put and a significant rise in permit applications for US academics planning to work in Canada.

Now there is talk of that brain gain going back down the drain. Some academics are looking south after many major laboratories have closed, including the announcement of no new projects at Genome Canada, the equivalent of a C$140 million (US$113 million) cut, and the three federal granting councils receiving C$148 million in reduced funding.

While there has been significant investment in shovel-ready infrastructure projects and new lab equipment, for many it is as if airplanes had been built with no money for the pilots to fly them.

University of Toronto physicist Professor Richard Peltier is watching the work at the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Science, with which is he associated, wind down.

With no new funding announced for next year, some of his Canadian colleagues at the foundation are looking to other countries, including one colleague from the University of Victoria who has decided to move to Australia where there is significant investment in climate research and another from the University of Calgary who is likely to head to Princeton.

While the Canadian government has put aside $87.5 million for graduate scholarships to 2011, there has not been enough money for those researchers who bring with them big teams and compete with those in the rest of the world.

"The superstars go where the money is," said Peltier. He added that despite the US spending significant amounts on science, including a plan to increase science research by US$15 billion, Canada had always been able to always carve out niches, climate change being one of them and genomics another.

Andrew MacDougall, a spokesman in the Office of the Prime Minister, said Canada's record compared favourably with the US, remarking that the OECD ranked Canada number one among G-7 countries for its support of university research.

"We've invested an additional $2.4 billion in science and technology since 2006 and we are making another $5.1 billion in new investments this year," MacDougall told University World News. "The granting councils identified some areas where they could save money, and our government is reinvesting every dollar of that money back into science and technology programmes."

While the government talks up its investments, there are more than 2,000 academics who disagree with that assessment and have signed an on-line petition that, by press time, had collected 2,144 signatures.

The petition asks the Prime Minister to "not leave Canada behind" as it plans its new economy: "When US researchers are being actively approached for ideas to use the stimulus money, to think big and to hire and retain their researchers, their Canadian counterparts are now scrambling to identify budget cuts for their labs, while worrying about the future of their graduating students," read the letter.

With its research stimulus not yet passed and its state funding in difficulty, some critics believe the US, in fact, will not lure back those academics who came to Canada. A recent article in Canada's University Affairs Magazine polled several American professors who had moved to Canada, finding that none planned to return home.

Julie Lessard, a 34-year-old star Canadian geneticist with the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer in Montreal, was recruited by Stanford University in California but would like to remain in her home country. While she estimates depressingly few research grant applications turn into actual grants - she guessed 15% - Lessard is confident her work will put her in that top 15% and keep her in Canada.

philip.fine@uw-news.com

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