The $1.7 B is a temporary measure to fund researcher salaries and research costs. They plan to recruit 1000 into a system that already has dwindling grant support and 12% grant success rates with 30% budget cuts. Even if anyone moved here for this, they will just moved back to the US once funding is restored in 36 months, so all Carney is doing is giving US science $1.7B to generate IP that will be developed in the US eventually, while ignoring scientists and engineers in Canada.

The US spent 4X per capita on science than Canada before Trump, and they have the computing and biotech industries worth trillions to show for it.

You can’t just move 1000 into Canada without more infrastructure because research already costs insitutions money.

Not sure where this fantasy of Professors lighting cigars with $100 bills is coming from, other than very few on Lemmy seem to be aware at what goes on in these insitutions.

No, it has not been the case for decades.

The $1.7 B is a temporary measure to fund researcher salaries and research costs.

It’s $134 million over three years to bring doctoral and post doctoral students over from the US, which isn’t temporary, and doesn’t mean it will end in three years, it just means that’s how far out they’ve budgeted funding for at the moment. They’re not going to be doing a detailed budget for these years out from now so it’s entirely likely that program will just get extended if it’s successful.

Then it’s $1B over 13 years in new grants, which may not be as much as the US, but is not nothing and is not temporary.

And lol if you think researchers are going to want to go back to the US or will be welcome back to the US in the short to mid term. They elected Trump on two non-consecutive occassions. If those researchers don’t come here they’re going to the EU, UK, Korea, Japan, India, etc.

That’s completely false and fabricated. Firstly, foreign students are capped at 8%. Secondly, they pay more tuition, but the institution does not get any government co-funding. Thirdly, in science, students are paid minimum stipends around $30K a year, so space on limited by research funding support, at which Canada is the lowest per capita of the G8. There is a level of demonstrated excellence to get into grad programs, not just a place to spend 5 more years to get a piece of paper.

It was certainly the case when I was in school, and that was decades ago.

Got that right. The head of our local college was making $400,000 a year before he retired. This is a small town college not a university, and that kind of income is ridiculously high for a college president in a town of 60,000. Thats double what our premier makes.

On the other hand, I did a little digging and compared to other English speaking nation universities, Canada is actually bottom of the list for paying our university presidents: https://higheredstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Figure-6.png

As clearly this thread has no clue what goes on at universities, or even knows the difference between universities and colleges, I’ll explain the OPs point.

$1.7B for 1000 scientist is $1.7M each, for 5 years in total. For senior scientists, this covers salary. But now we have 1000 extra grant applications in a system that is funded at 20% the level of the US per capita. This means we will try and recruit Americans, but tell them they will have an under 10% chance of getting any grant money, and that grant size is half a typical NIH or NSF grant. Large projects? Zero. This research has to be done somewhere, which costs universities money. The same universities getting squeezed by frozen tuitions the last 6 years.

So it is a designed bullshit line item. No one will access this because by the time it rolls out to real funds, the US will have reverted funding and going back to trouncing this banana republic. Excellence, why would an established scientists move to a poorly funded system? They will get more done of they just ride the storm in US.

This money goes to cancer and disease research, like lipid nanoparticles that saved millions of lives with COVID vaccines (yes, that came from Canada), or neural network algorithms driving trillions in investment, also from Canada, but we just pissed away that IP to the US for a handful of shiny rocks.

If Carney is serious about CDN productivity, he needs to fund R&D at per capita levels closer to US or China and make sure the result of this research is developed in Canada, not just sold off cheap to the US as per the last 60 years. A decent economist would realize there is tremendous potential return on investment, far higher than subsidies for pickup truck production to US corporations, and certainly more than the 100-150x more we waste on military spending which does nothing for the CDN economy.

This does not affect colleges. They don’t do research and are for vocational training.

Lol. I had some profs who would never have gotten their first loonie.

Ontario is just over $6K for most programs, $9K for engineering and B.Comm coops.

US, many times that.

I don’t think you’re talking about the same thing. There’s tuition cost in the sense of what students pay to get an education, and there’s what it costs the university to provide that education. You can cap the former. You can’t cap the latter.

Isn’t growing universities a good thing? It seems to me that giving everyone access to a university education would be highly beneficial to the people.

WTF are you even talking about?

The absolute cost of tuition doesn’t speak to whether the school is “gouging,” which would imply excessive profit-taking with funds moving to private investors – WHO DON’T EVEN EXIST IN THIS SCENARIO.

No school’s tuition covers the actual cost for Canadian citizens. Every tuition is highly subsidized. If anything, we’re gouging the schools, because they are not allowed to raise tuitions but their costs are going up while their revenue is dropping.

Honestly, I don’t think you even know what the word “gouge” means. HINT: IT DOESN’T MEAN “EXPENSIVE”

Health care money is very notoriously being withheld from hospitals, and gets redirected to private clinics at several times the cost to taxpayers. This is not the situation in education. We don’t have a massive pay-to-play tier of Universities. They’re all non-profit.

Where the fuck do you people get your ignorant ideas? Who is telling you this bullshit? Are you all just still mad about getting detention or something??

Perhaps if you had of attended either institution, you wouldn’t make comments like that one.

Firstly, foreign students are capped at 8%

Is that a new cap? Just for graduate schools? It’s been a while since my annecdote or Uni experience.

Almost all Canadian Universities (and the ones we are really talking about here) are all non-profit. They reinvest any profits back into the institution to improve their capacity for research. This is why Canada has some of the world’s leading research universities. They are not profiting to make individual people richer, they are profiting to make society and our future richer.

This is starting to change though. There are unfortunately a growing number of for-profit “universities” in the country but most of them are transparently low quality diploma-mills (which is a whole different problem that needs dealing with) and aside from misleading naive domestic and mostly international students and separating them from their money, they remain of very marginal educational or research significance. That may not continue though unless we do something to support our large majority of non-profit universities.

We were so close with Trudeau. He was elected entirely on the back of that promise and everyone knew it. All we had to do was hold his feet to the fire when he tried to weasel out of it after getting the majority that left him no reasonable excuse for not following through. But we all know what happened. He later even said his biggest regret was not following through on electoral reform. Well, yeah. I’m not sure I believe him, but if he’s telling the truth I hope it fucking haunts him. It should. I’ll certainly never forgive him.