The federal government’s recent industry-friendly makeover of the National Research Council is just the latest in a series of decisions by the federal government that have chipped away at Canada’s research infrastructure. The 2012 budget set out a 5-per-cent cut to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Canada’s science-funding body, including a moratorium on the Major Resources Support (MRS) program. The MRS allowed researchers to develop large-scale equipment and facilities beyond the means of Canada’s cash-strapped universities. Here are four MRS-grant recipients on the significance of their work and the cost of the cuts.

Larry Heaman, Associate Dean Research of the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Science: The Canadian Centre for Isotopic Microanalysis (CCIM) at the University of Alberta is a $30-million facility dedicated to research into the Earth’s evolution and the formation of natural resources. It consists of several state-of-the-art mass spectrometer facilities including Canada’s only high-resolution multi-collector ion probe site, which has been invaluable, for instance, in developing new models for diamond formation.

Previous MRS funding has allowed an open door research policy to be maintained and more than 50 graduate students (national and international) have been fully trained in the facilities over the past five years. The annual operating budget is roughly $1.2 million and some 80 per cent of this is used to support 10 full-time research staff. Loss of funding jeopardizes research access to national laboratories, forces job losses, erodes the ability to develop innovative techniques and the leading-edge status of Canadian research facilities, and leads to ineffective use of Canadian research infrastructure that was successfully built over the past two decades with tax dollars.

Brad Anholt, director of the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre on Barkley Sound, B.C.: Since 1970, the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre has been an observation post on Barkley Sound. It is the only place between Alaska and Oregon where such long-term data have been collected in so many habitats on the outer coast. In a time of unprecedented changes in the ocean, these background data are essential for meaningful comparisons. The last round of MRS funding was to be focused on strengthening that data collection and serving the data on the web for worldwide access. This is no longer possible.

This funding loss also challenges our ability to fulfil regulatory requirements mandated by bodies such as the Canadian Council on Animal Care and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, keep equipment in good repair, and still provide the extraordinary facilities to researchers from across Canada and to the world.

Jeffrey Hutchings, Killam Professor in the Faculty of Science at Dalhousie University and president of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution: MRS funds supported Dalhousie University’s Aquatron. This facility has the largest and deepest seawater research tanks in North America; they can reproduce parts of ocean ecosystems. It is home to unique work by Canadian and international scientists. For example, it taught us that sound produced by cod is fundamental to their mating, raising the question of whether human-produced noise harms fish or their reproduction. In addition to fisheries and endangered species, Aquatron research has touched on work as varied as the treatment of diabetes (using transgenic fish), health of farmed fish, invasive species in ship ballast water and environmental consequences of aquaculture.

Many have benefited from our MRS support: more than 100 students, 15 government agencies, 22 private enterprises, 24 universities, and 10 non-governmental organizations. The Aquatron’s discovery and applied research, and its contributions to education, government and business, face an uncertain future with the loss of the MRS program.

Sjoerd Roorda, director of the Regroupement québécois de matériaux de pointe (network for research in advanced materials): Our MRS grant supports three particle accelerators at the University of Montreal and at Western University in London (a hockey rink full of interconnected scientific equipment) and enables a wide variety of research and measurement, from pure fundamental physics (the search for dark matter in the universe) to industrial characterization services (testing new and better automotive lubricants). We typically allocate more than 50 per cent of facility time to users from more than 20 Canadian universities and laboratories, and from abroad (10 different countries in the last three years), all working on different scientific subjects.

This is made possible because the MRS grant pays the technicians required to maintain, run, and repair the accelerators day-in, day-out. The demise of the MRS program is symptomatic of the chronic underfunding of science and research. There is money, sometimes, to buy equipment, but no money to maintain it and run it. It's like buying new buses for public transport but firing the drivers.