Lorinc | Donald Trump has created a golden opportunity for Canada

Good suggestion, talent focussed:

….This time around, Trump’s MAGA warriors have perversely turned their sights on scientists and graduate students living inside the U.S., particularly those working in health, public health and bio-medical research by halting federal research grants.

We ought to take full advantage of the fall-out from Trump’s post-fact/anti-science crusade. The Canadian government, provincial higher education ministries and individual universities should be racing to find ways to attract American scientists whose research funding has suddenly dried up in the face of political attacks.

As happened in 2017 with the U.S. travel ban, Canadian research teams have already been caught up in the disruption because the collaborative and multi-disciplinary nature of science means that NIH-funded projects include principal investigators outside the U.S. They’re all witnessing the impact of these freezes in real time, with tangible implications for their research programs.

Of course, established scientists working in well-resourced institutions can’t just pull up stakes, re-direct their mail and move. But we know that some are pondering their own futures, and the future of their work, so anything that Canada can do to entice those individuals to re-locate will be well worth the effort. After all, we can offer proximity, shared languages and reasonably robust public institutions.

Such a move needs to be situated within a wider policy pivot necessitated by the Trump shocks. In recent weeks, there’s been a lot of talk about diversifying our export base, bringing down interprovincial trade barriers and potentially providing Canadians displaced by tariffs with some kind of emergency assistance. The Conservatives also want to cut corporate taxes.

To this list, I’d add, as have many others, that Canada needs to confront its stubbornly low productivity. One important way to do that is to build a policy environment that encourages investment all along the productivity food chain, from R&D to the commercialization of emerging Canadian technologies to proactive measures that incentivize companies and governments to invest in these tools.

Welcoming American researchers and post-docs to relocate to Canada is one piece of that puzzle. The others include: improved funding for university-based technology transfer offices, which help commercialize basic and applied R&D; targeted policies that encourage early-stage investors to back and grow Canadian start-ups; and tax and procurement tools designed to encourage Canadian corporations and governments to invest in those technologies….

Source: Opinion | Donald Trump has created a golden opportunity for Canada