The federal government is tightening the screws on universities across the country to stop collaborating with any “foreign state actor who poses a risk to national security.”
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“An application for a research grant in a sensitive area will be refused if one of the researchers working on the project is affiliated with a university, a research institute or a laboratory attached to a military organization or to a national defense or state security of a foreign state actor who represents a risk to national security,” Ottawa said in a statement released late Tuesday afternoon.
Since 2021, the policy has only targeted military research, but now extends to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and even the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
These parastatal institutions largely determine which projects are worthy or not of funding.
However, the new directive does not only affect research projects funded in one way or another by Ottawa, but goes well beyond that.
Ottawa “urges” Universities Canada and the Group of Canadian Research Universities (U15) to “adopt similar guidelines for all their research partnerships, particularly those related to sensitive areas”.
The new directive from the Minister of Innovation, Science and Innovation, François-Philippe Champagne, should be “implemented quickly”, we promise. It was developed in concert with the Ministers of Health and Public Safety.
Calling himself “absolutely not naive”, Minister Champagne had promised that he would better protect research in Canada after a survey by the “Globe & Mail” which revealed, at the end of January, that McGill University was ranked 3rd among universities working on more closely with the National University of Defense Technology of China.