“Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value.” That’s an extreme position for anyone to hold, but coming from the country’s chief scientist, it’s a sign that something is very wrong.

The comment, made by National Research Council president John MacDougall, is an expression of the philosophy behind the federal government’s makeover of Canada’s science agency into a tool box for industry. Gary Goodyear, minister of state for science and technology, announced last week that the NRC will shift its focus away from so-called basic research — science for no immediate purpose other than knowledge-gathering — to “large-scale research projects that are directed by and for Canadian business.” In other words, the government is set to transform the agency’s $900-million budget into a business subsidy.

It’s an approach that yet again highlights the Conservative government’s antagonism to evidence; reflects a misunderstanding of how science, including innovation, works; and suggests some confusion about the role of government.

The non-commercial value of Canadian science to both our quality of life and to our economy is not to be dismissed. As world-renowned ecologist David Schindler pointed out on thestar.com last week , government research on lake ecologies has been key to preserving the health of our freshwater bodies and the valuable fisheries therein — and at a cost far lower than would have been possible without it. That’s one example among many of science that no business will fund, but that any government ought to want as it develops policy.

But even if we leave aside the public interest, and we reject the idea that knowledge is valuable in itself, the NRC’s new industry-facing stance still makes no sense. It wrongly assumes that basic research is a distraction from, rather than a prerequisite for, innovation.

As a chorus of scientists has pointed out since the announcement, basic research is the soil from which innovation grows. “I look at science as a pyramid,” Queen’s University Environmental Studies professor John Smol told the Star . “At the bottom you have all this basic fundamental research and at the top you have the applied. But you can’t have the applied without the basic.”

There would be no computers without Kurt Gödel’s recondite math, no televisions without Albert Einstein’s theoretical physics. When the late NRC scientist John Hopps was doing esoteric research on the effects of radio frequency heating on hypothermia, he never imagined it would lead to his invention of the pacemaker. Science is a serendipitous pursuit; it can be only so targeted.

The government has said that as it does more to commercialize science, industry should be picking up the slack on basic research. But that’s backwards. Why is government pursuing short-term economic gains and leaving the long-term public interest to the private sector? No CEO in his right mind would invest millions in a particle collider whose indeterminate dividends may not pay off for decades.

Meanwhile, cash-strapped universities can’t afford to build the infrastructure necessary for ambitious work in, say, particle physics or lake ecology. Only government can provide the funds and the foresight to ensure that Canadian science continues to be fertile ground for industries to till.

It’s true that Canada has been slow to transform research into commercially viable innovation, and true, too, that redressing that failure is important to our economic future. But the solution clearly cannot start with dismantling our basic-research infrastructure.

This is a wrong-headed redesign of a once-great agency. Even if we accept the government’s unenlightened view that the value of science is purely commercial, the new NRC looks like a bust.