Stepping up: Canadian research in the shadow of cuts in the United States

This episode of the CMAJ Podcast examines how recent changes to U.S. federal research funding are affecting the global scientific landscape—and what they could mean for Canada. The discussion focuses on indirect costs, talent retention, and whether Canada is positioned to step into any gaps left behind. The hosts speak with two guests who have written recent articles in CMAJ offering insight into how policymakers and institutions in Canada might respond.

Dr. William Ghali, vice president of research at the University of Calgary, outlines how indirect research costs are funded in both countries and explains why the proposed U.S. cuts—though now on hold—would have had severe consequences for American institutions. He also discusses the strength of Canadian research infrastructure, recent federal budget commitments, and the challenges of recruiting U.S.-based researchers without stronger domestic supports.

Dr. Kirsten Patrick, editor-in-chief of CMAJ, expands on the policy shifts required to improve Canadian research capacity. She calls for reforms to indirect cost funding and a reassessment of how Canada prioritizes health research—highlighting the gap between identifying systemic problems and investing in studies that offer practical solutions. She also reflects on the broader implications of editorial independence in a politically pressured environment.

The episode raises timely questions for policymakers: Is Canada prepared to fill the gap left by a potential U.S. withdrawal from medical research leadership? Are we investing strategically in infrastructure, talent, and funding priorities to meet this moment? And what will it take to ensure Canadian research moves from identifying problems to generating meaningful solutions?

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The CMAJ Podcast is produced by PodCraft Productions

Transcript

Dr. Blair Bigham:

I'm Blair Bigham. 

Dr. Mojola Omole:

I'm Mojola Omole. This is the CMAJ Podcast.

So, Blair, today we're talking about a big issue that, for some people, might be politically charged, which is the major shift in U.S. research funding.

Dr. Blair Bigham:

Yeah, and we're gonna try to focus on the Canadian context and what the threats to scientific research south of the border might mean for us as Canadians. And to do that, we have two fantastic guests who have recently written editorials published in CMAJ on these topics. The first editorial by Kirsten Patrick, the editor-in-chief of CMAJ, and the other editorial by William Ghali, who works at the University of Calgary as the Vice President of Research.

And instead of Jola and I chatting, we're just gonna jump right into this interview. 

Dr. Blair Bigham:

Kirsten and Bill, welcome to the podcast. 

Dr. William Ghali:

Thank you.

Dr. Kirsten Patrick:

Thanks for having us.

Dr. Blair Bigham:

How about we start with a big question? If the U.S. is no longer on track to be a research superpower, what role does that leave for Canada?

Dr. Kirsten Patrick:

Okay, so I think the U.S. in terms of science knowledge is making itself irrelevant in the fabric of scientific medical understanding in the world. And while that's really sad because the U.S. used to be a research powerhouse in the medical sciences, we need to fill that gap as other countries in the world and particularly Canada in the North American context by strengthening our medical scientific output going forward.

Dr. William Ghali:

And maybe I could just jump in and add that certainly there's been a huge amount of change and a lot of news coverage about the changes that are occurring in the U.S. since the January 20th inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term as president. And there's no question that the backdrop is one of a very strong health and medical research enterprise in the U.S. with very substantial successes and impact for the very recent mRNA vaccines that were such a key to our mitigating the pandemic. Those were a product of, yes, global science and there were global collaborations that made that science, in fact, an important Canadian component around the lipid nanoparticles that were the envelope of the vaccine that made the whole vaccine possible.

But American research funding, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania were a big part of the foundational scientific work for those vaccines. So the big comment to make is that the U.S. has a remarkably strong health and medical research enterprise, but the changes now are really threatening it substantially and are going to require other parts of the world perhaps stepping in to fill a void.

Dr. Mojola Omole:

I guess my question is, we asked the question, other countries need to step in and fill in the void. Can we, in Canada, in the state of our research , actually realistically step in, not necessarily in the next year, but even in the next five years?

Dr. William Ghali:

So maybe I'll start the answer and then Kirsten could jump in too. I think an opening comment I'd make is that Canadian science is strong in many respects. We have right now, overtures from the European Commission identifying Canada as a strong partner country for the rise in Europe.

Opportunities, we’re near the top of global rankings in terms of per capita scientific publication as a country. And while we do look at overall expenditures on research and development in Canada being not optimal and not ranking at the top of the OECD, we do rank very well in public sector spending on research. And we have good universities that produce a lot of outstanding scientists out of this country.

So that's a foundational comment to make. The federal budget from April 2024 did announce new investments in funding across all tri-councils. So not just health research, but all types of research and additional training investments for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, which are important for our future.

So we have a foundation that is perhaps a little better than we realize. And the recent federal budget from 2024 increased investments in research. So I do want to say that so that we don't start from a position of saying, oh, we're so terrible, because I really do think there's a strong foundation.

Dr. Kirsten Patrick:

So just to build on that with having a strong foundation, as Bill outlined in his commentary, there have been calls to strengthen funding of research. The indirect funding, which is the infrastructure funding for research in Canada, and those calls have not really been taken up. But I think that this is an important time to look at the way that we fund research at the university level in Canada, how much we offer universities for their indirect costs, and see whether that's up to the task if we're going to be stepping up and filling gaps on a global stage.

Dr. Blair Bigham:

I'd like to try to get into a direct comparison between the US and Canada, specifically in the area of indirect funding. And this is something that in the States, there's been a clear directive to drop that level of indirect funding down to 15%. Bill, in your article, you described that as cataclysmic.

And we've certainly heard outcry about what the impact of that could be. I feel like these indirect expenses or indirect funding doesn't get a lot of sympathy, right? Researchers just see huge chunks of money coming off their grants going to just the general university pockets.

Bill, tell me, what are indirect costs? Why are they so important? And dropping them to 15%, what type of damage does that do?

Dr. William Ghali:

Yeah., yeah. So, and you're right, Blair, to say, how many people have sympathy or even understanding of indirect costs? Certainly myself, now that I'm a vice president of research, well, where a lot of bills come across the desks of university administrators. Research is expensive, and that includes the library holdings.

So, every time a researcher does their citation list and reads literature to help them with their research grants and their research projects, they use libraries. And libraries cost millions of dollars across Canada for the literature that we need to access. And then, of course, IT systems for research, data storage for research in health, where we're often talking about animal care costs, specialized laboratories, etc.

There's so many financial systems for research. Your grants are held in an audited public institution that has an expense associated with that. And then the legal contracts for research involve legal fees and lawyers.

So, all of that costs money. So, the good thing in Canada, in some ways, is that the check for indirect costs doesn't go to the researcher who got the grant. So, the researcher doesn't necessarily feel they're getting gouged.

Universities in Canada get through a backdoor later, once a year, a big check that is the rolled up indirect cost revenue associated with their government grant revenue.

Dr. Blair Bigham:

In the States it's been quoted that the indirect costs that a university could experience are anywhere around 40, 50, even 60 percent. A drop to 15 percent, obviously, you're more than halving what that university is used to bringing in.

But talk to me about Canada. How much are we being funded for the indirect costs of research through this sort of annual payout?

Dr. William Ghali:

So, in Canada, we're paid at about, it varies by university because of the amount of granting received, but it's on the order of 19 to 21 percent for major research universities of Canada. And we do know from some estimates of true indirect costs in Canada that they're closer to 60 percent. So, 60 cents on the dollar.

And as you said, in the US, some institutions, the most research intensive universities are actually close to 70 percent in their negotiated indirect cost rates with the federal government.

Dr. Blair Bigham:

So, if Canada's kind of coping with the difference between 60 cents on the dollar and only being reimbursed 19 percent, it seems like a drop in the US from 60 to 70 percent down to 15 percent. I mean, if we're managing at 19 percent, is this really catastrophic for the States or is it just going to take a bit of figuring out?

Dr. William Ghali:

That's a good question, Blair. I think that my reaction would be to say, on a dime, if this change were to occur, and I should mention that the 15 percent across the board rate was proposed, was brought in by the NIH, announced, and then there was very quickly a court injunction against the action pending further ruling from the Federal District Court of Massachusetts. And then there has since the article been coming out, there has been a ruling from that court saying that that cut cannot be applied.

So, it is suspended as of this moment. However, other federal agencies, the National Energy Agency in the US has introduced a 15 percent across the board cut. It's going to be challenged, I believe, in the same way.

But suffice it to say, if it went into being that it wasn't across the board 15 percent, then a number of major institutions like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University of Michigan, some of the University of California institutions would have a greater than 100 million dollar cut annualized instantaneously, which is pretty drastic. So, there would need to be some solutions. I think saying, oh, they could just dip into endowments, of course, is variable across institutions.

State-funded universities are not rich institutions like Harvard or Hopkins. I think it would be extremely difficult and people would lose their jobs, technicians would lose their jobs, labs would have to shut down, things would have to be scaled back, I think without question. Could there eventually be a recalibration? Perhaps.

Dr. Mojola Omole:

Do you think we have, like in Canada, we can create an environment to attract US researchers to come and set up their labs here?

Dr. William Ghali:

Yeah, and this is, and I know Kirsten and I in an interaction as we were each working on our respective articles, I think it raised the question, well, can we recruit people to Canada when we have a suboptimal indirect cost system? And it's easy for us to say, oh, there's a great opportunity to recruit scientists who want to flee from the instability now in the US. But to your question, Jola, we do need to have labs for them.

We have to have a capacity to absorb additional people. We need offices for them, startup packages. And the truth is we're not, and I can speak for my university at the University of Calgary, but I think for our sector in Canada, it's not that easy to sponge up a bunch of capacity and create good opportunities because good science and good people are expensive.

Dr. Blair Bigham:

So this has been framed, this situation in the US as an opportunity for Canada. Tell me more about the barriers to taking advantage of that opportunity, kind of like what you were saying, Bill, like we're not just ready to welcome hundreds of scientists north of the 49th parallel. What are the barriers to that?

And then, Kirsten, maybe I'll ask you as well this, what's the solution? What is a time-sensitive thing that governments or universities need to take up to take advantage of this opportunity? Kirsten, do you want to start?

Dr. Kirsten Patrick:

So, yeah, I mean, you talked about an opportunity and some people call it a crisis-tunity. Can we say, wow, we can make Canada more of a powerhouse by attracting very high-profile individuals from the States. But I think as Bill already said, immigration is hard to accomplish.

That's like resource-intensive. Then if you bring folks here and they're not given what they promised, or they're not able to realize the potential that they were promised, it becomes a negative thing. What the imperative is to strengthen our systems so that it could support immigrants or home researchers.

I think that there would be a little bit of ill will if universities were to suddenly find funds for foreign recruits that they haven't been bestowing on their very promising in-house researchers. And I think there's an imperative for us to strengthen the system so that it would be as easy to bring somebody up from inside as it would be to attract somebody from outside.

Dr. Blair Bigham:

So, increasing the indirect funding that Canadian universities get from that 19 to 21 percent to a closer value. Is that sort of what you have in mind, Kirsten, when we talk about a national way of enhancing our abilities to do medical research, whether homegrown or recruiting Americans?

Dr. Kirsten Patrick:

So, I think that's one part of it. But I also think that we as a medical research community and in partnership with policymakers need to be really thinking about what is the important research. Because there's a thing that we say about Canada that we're the land of the pilot project.

I think that there is a lot of research done in Canada that kind of goes nowhere. And that may sound really critical and Bill may be frowning at me as I'm saying that. But I see this at the journal.

A lot of research coming that outlines the size of the problem. We can interrogate our databases in Ontario to elucidate the size of a problem. But we don't get a lot of research submitted to CMAJ that is about how to fix the problem or make the health system more efficient or whatever.

So, I think CIHR maybe has a job to be looking at how they prioritize health research so that research is funded for how effective it can be to making the health services better.

Dr. Mojola Omole:

I think we also don't necessarily have, like in the U.S., because it's driven by insurance, there is a desire to make it more efficient to save money. And so, we don't necessarily have that same carrot in front of us in Canada. And that might also be part of the challenge.

Dr. Kirsten Patrick:

Possibly. That is possible. I mean, you know, and I'm going to indulge myself here, often when I give talks about what the journal does, I point out the WHO's health framework system from 2007.

It's from a document called, sorry, from a document called Improving Health Systems. And it puts the health system as a series of building blocks, right, that together will achieve an outcome. And I think that when we think about health systems in popular discourse, we think about hospitals and doctors and maybe drugs and vaccines, but we don't think about the information and all these indirect resources that Bill was describing before that go into the healthcare system.

So, I think that there is an education piece as well in Canada. What does it mean to have a universal healthcare system, which we don't have? We don't have universal healthcare.

We have some healthcare that is free at the point of provision. What does it take to create an efficient universal healthcare system that serves everybody equitably? I don't know that we ask that question carefully enough when we're funding the knowledge components of the healthcare system.

Dr. Blair Bigham:

That's an interesting insight into the type of research being conducted and certainly what's coming across your desk, Kirsten. Bill, across your desk, you're cutting a bunch of checks for the cost of this research. What would your message to policy makers be in the research ecosystem about how to strengthen Canadian research?

Dr. William Ghali:

And you know, so I'll make a comment that we'll definitely talk about the foundation of the indirect costs topic that I wrote about in the commentary. But actually, in terms of importance, I do want to speak of talent. So, the talent is such a foundational piece and there is an opportunity.

And the talent ingredient, everybody does think about recruiting superstars to come to Canada in this moment of clearly some crisis in the US, and there is perhaps an opportunity. There's also an opportunity with early career researchers, so postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and early career researchers, because those are people who have, after all, a career ahead of them. Recruiting that foundation, that key ingredient of people is an opportunity.

It does have to come with a consideration of, well, there will be grant dollars available from the tri-council. You can't just add to the denominator of people applying, you have to add to the pool of funds available. So, that does need to be strategically considered.

And then you have to be thinking about, well, what about the facilities that they work in and the universities where they need a place to work, the databases, the systems, the libraries, and that's where the indirect costs component comes in. So, you almost need to be thinking about all three of those pieces as three, everyone talks about the three-legged stool, there's the people component, there's the project funding component, and then there's the foundational costs component. I am encouraged by some discussions with government agencies, funding agencies, and in meetings with leadership of research funding agencies and our Ministry of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development they're thinking about all three of those components and that's very encouraging.

Dr. Mojola Omole:

So, just the last question I wanted to ask, Kristen, was that we've been hearing in news reports that U.S. journals have received letters from Department of Justice just making demands regarding some of their editorial independence. Would this maybe make the CMAJ a more attractive place for some U.S. researchers to publish their research?

Dr. Kirsten Patrick:

I'm not so sure. It's because there has been an edict out of the executive office in the U.S. that certain words and certain ways of researching are not allowed to be done and it doesn't matter where you're going to be submitting your paper. If you're a federally employed researcher, you're going to be having to take your name off that paper.

So, I know that the BMJ, for example, is grappling with this at the moment with some submitted manuscripts where authors are asking to remove themselves and they have to figure out how to deal with that situation. We haven't had that yet at the CMAJ, but I'm not sure that it's going to mean that we're going to get an increase in that kind of research from the U.S. That is just a problem for federally funded U.S. researchers in general.

Dr. Blair Bigham:

Pains me to wrap up this conversation because I'm having a blast, but that brings us to the end of our q-line and our time. I just want to thank both of you for joining us and for the writing that you've done on this topic.

Dr. William Ghali:

Thank you. Great conversation. Thanks.

Dr. Blair Bigham:

Dr. Kirsten Patrick: is the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, and Dr. William Ghali: is vice president of research at the University of Calgary.

Okay, Jola, it's back to just you and I here. Our boss is out of the room.

What do we say about both the threat and the opportunity?

Dr. Mojola Omole:

What makes me skeptical about Canada being able to fill, maybe not the entire void, that if the U.S. is no longer a superpower when it comes to research, is the entrepreneurial spirit that goes into being in the U.S. Unfortunately, and people can come for me for it, I don't really care. We don't necessarily have that here.

Dr. Blair Bigham:

Well, Kirsten even said that a lot of what comes across her desk is like defining the problem, but maybe not fixing it.

Dr. Mojola Omole:

And I do think that there is an ecosystem that goes beyond medicine that exists in the U.S. that people come up with solutions to things that you don't even know were a problem. And that does have a trickle effect into research in the medical field. That is my hesitation in being like, all right, let's ramp up the funding.

We can do this. And also being able to create compensation and an environment that could be competitive as the U.S. 

Dr. Blair Bigham:

It's funny, I mean, some incredible medical innovations have come out of Canada by Canadians. 

Dr. Mojola Omole:

Insulin.

Dr. Blair Bigham:

A lot of insulin. But a lot of the time, it does feel like when Canadians invest in these large multi-center clinical trials, we're sometimes answering a question that maybe isn't the most spectacular question.

It's not going to change the game too much. It might save us a couple of dollars by finding that we don't need to use albumin or antibiotics as much as we thought. But it does seem like sometimes we fail to swing for the fences.

Is that a term, swing for the fences, Neil? That's a thing. 

Dr. Mojola Omole:

I've literally never heard that term before. Did you pick that up in Silicon Valley? 

Dr. Blair Bigham:

No, no, no. It's a basketball term.

Dr. Mojola Omole:

Swing for the fences? 

Dr. Blair Bigham:

Football. Baseball. Yeah.

Dr. Mojola Omole:

Can you please leave this in?

Dr. Blair Bigham

It was a joke. I was being funny. I've been to a baseball game.

Dr. Mojola Omole:

I do think that this is an important chance to start incubating at the level of university students, of trying to build that capacity and build that spirit of let's come up with solutions to problems that we already have in our country, but also globally.

Dr. Blair Bigham:

But speaking to a problem in our country is the issue of university funding, which, you know, with some political changes around international students, a lot of universities have less money than they have in a long time. So I think that we're onto something here that as we watch what's happening in the U.S., let's bite our tongue a little bit and say, well, wait a minute, how's our own shop doing? And are we adequately funding the work that should be done here?

Otherwise, we're not going to be attractive to other scientists. And you can bet that Canada is not the only country asking, is there an opportunity here?

Dr. Mojola Omole:

For sure. That's it for the CMAJ podcast. The link to the articles are in the show notes.

Thank you so much for listening. Please rate, share, review the podcast. The podcast is produced for CMAJ by Neil Morrison at PodCraft Production.

Catherine Varner is our deputy editor of the CMAJ and senior editor on the podcast. I'm Mojola Omole. 

Dr. Blair Bigham:

And I'm Blair Bigham. Until next time, be well.