“Tell my wife I love her very much.” “We don’t have the funding!”

Two Canadian institutions came plummeting back to Earth last night: the fragile hopes and dreams of every Leafs fan, and astronaut Chris Hadfield.

Canadian Prime Minister and noted Leafs fan Stephen Harper didn’t have much to say about Game Seven, but he did take to Twitter to congratulate Hadfield and welcome him home. “A reminder,” he said, “that our potential is limitless when we aim high.”

“Our potential is higher when we fund research,” another tweeter quickly replied.

Nicely done, right? A reasoned and eloquent burn, if ever there was one. Here’s a politician trying to hitch his wagon to Hadfield’s star, despite his government’s widespread reputation for hobbling science at every turn. It seems like a bit of a contradiction, unless this Hadfield thing is good for business, in which case it’s okay.

But hold on! There’s more to the funding issue than these criticisms suggest. As Paul Wells of Maclean’s noted in a recent blog post, the current government has actually spent more on science than any previous government. “The Conservatives came to office with no strong idea about what to do in the field,” he writes, “and eventually decided to hold and slowly increase the overall budgets they inherited from the Liberals.”

The problem isn’t the funding; it’s the way it’s being allocated. The new money has been tightly targeted, at the expense of grants and general research. The field of study has been narrowed, which of course has a very limiting effective on scientific innovation.

“So the government is paying more tax dollars for a lousy reputation,” Wells writes, “than its predecessor paid for a good reputation… And the likeliest upshot of the dawning realization that momentum is not following government dollars is that there will be fewer government dollars.”

So there you are. It’s not that the government isn’t spending money in science. It’s just that they’re not spending it very wisely. And once we inevitably draw diminishing returns on their investment, they’ll have all the numbers they need to justify some real cuts.

In the meantime, it’s a good thing we’ve got a guy like Chris Hadfield to call our own. He’s done quite a lot for the popular perception of science, and we can certainly take a national pride in his achievements. Let’s just not rush to judgment on that “limitless potential” thing for now.

Posted in Social Action

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