Two quick bits.

One, tonight the finalists for the prestigious Canada Excellence Research Chairs program will be presented. This program is superficially similar to the kind of big-funding initiatives I argued are needed in Canada and already exist in the US. The difference, as usual, is that these are focused on applied research:

The CERC program invests $28 million a year to attract and retain the world’s most accomplished and promising minds and help Canada build a critical mass of expertise in the priority research areas of environmental sciences and technologies, natural resources and energy, health and related life sciences and technologies, and information and communication technologies.

Two, the Liberal party has released some stats on the actual funding that the government is delivering for research, and it is nothing like what we’re being told is being allotted.