A review of the federal granting councils is calling for changes to the way Canada's two non-health councils are governed and recommending the creation of a cross-agency mechanism with other federal research funding agencies to ensure better coordination and priority-setting. The review was conducted by James Mitchell of the Sussex Circle consulting firm in response to an announcement in last year's federal Budget (R$, May 16/06).

At that time, the government said it would "undertake a review of the accountability and value for money of the granting councils' activities." Although it was not mentioned in the Budget documents, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) was excluded from the process, apparently because it had recently been the subject of a statutory five-year review by an international panel (R$, July 7/06).

Known internally to government as the Mitchell Report, the review of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has yet to be officially released by Industry Canada. However, a copy of the December 15/06 report has been posted on the web site of Ryerson Univ (www.ryerson.ca/ors/).

The resulting report — entitled A Review of NSERC and SSHRC — "is not a ground-up review", writes Mitchell, but one that "builds on the self-studies recently completed by the two councils". It examines the councils from the perspectives of:

* performance measurement and results (value for money);

* governance and accountability;

* relationship between the councils and the government; and,

* alignment of the councils with other federal research funding agencies.

It says that the $15 billion invested in higher education research by the federal government since 1997 has "produced impressive and demonstrable results in terms of increasing the numbers of high-quality researchers in Canada, numbers of graduate students and high-quality personnel trained, and influential papers published and cited".

However, the contribution of university research "has not received the attention it deserves" due to the long-term nature of university research and less than optimum publicizing of its funding successes. Even more troubling, it says that the federal investment is "in danger of being wasted if there is not better coordination of both government investments in research and spending by the research granting council".

It states that NSERC and SSHRC must be better integrated with other federal granting agencies and work to improve their ability to publicize research achievements. That includes the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Genome Canada and others.

High among the report's recommendations is a change in the governing councils to enhance accountability. Changes range from the drastic (changing the councils from departmental corporations into Crown agencies) to the more moderate option of assigning the chair of their governing councils to someone other than the council presidents so that the governing councils function more like governing boards.

The latter change would remove the president from being in a potential conflict with him- or herself and place the president in the position of taking guidance from the board. Such an understanding would require new mechanisms to formalize the new arrangement and be confirmed by the Industry minister and the new chair.

SSHRC's new president, Dr Chad Gaffield, is already pushing for a separation of the president and council chair functions (R$, October 4/06). The report notes that the separation of the president/chair functions is seen as an imperative more by the SSHRC community than it is within NSERC.

The report also stresses that the accountability relationship between councils and the government needs to be clarified and strengthened by focusing on agreed-to results that the councils are expected to achieve.

greater integration

On the issue of aligning federal research funding, the Mitchell report says the activities of all players "must be treated as an interconnected whole", with a greater emphasis on working across discipline boundaries. It suggests adopting a new cross-agency mechanism comprised of the heads of all research funding players to handle annual planning and priority setting, harmonization of application requirements, setting and adjusting research priorities, managing shared committees and taking an integrated approach to dealing with the research communities. Current mechanisms are deemed to be inadequate.

The report makes clear that such a body is required to deal with the increasing complex and overlapping nature of research, it should not be seen as an attempt to exert more external control.

"While the Minister of Industry and his officials could direct the concerned agencies to create such a coordinating body, it should be seen and operated as a creature of the research funding agencies and not as a departmental mechanism," it states.

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