News to me, and I hate it too

Soon after I became AD EDI, my answer to “what is science?” rapidly changed from “questions, hypotheses, experiments, statistics, etc.” to “people” and that’s stayed with me since

Is anyone thinking of drafting a letter signed by thousands of scientists to explain to the prime minister that the Canadian scientific community doesn’t want the funding system he proposes? I’m happy to help!

I just got off an extremely depressing call with my amazing Canadian collaborators at Natural Resources Canada who are facing cuts, retirement buy-outs, and layoffs for biologists across the board. This just seems a slap in the face to scientists in Canada.

Canadian scientist here. I don't want this. I want you to fund our excellent early career scientists who do great work in Canada. Fund them properly and that will help 1000x more than recruiting handfuls of cherry picked bigwigs from Harvard, Stanford and MIT who will leave after a few years.

I can confirm that, with the items I mentioned plus insulated boots, three layers of tops, neoprene half face mask, toque, insulated mitts, and a heavy ski jacket, it really wasn’t so bad! 😅

I know we don’t really disagree, and I still want to say: when someone as good as you is getting $35k a year from our main federal funding agency (at a time when one single grad student stipend is $31k), the system isn’t what it could be

With a fair bit of work and creativity

Allowing for one GTA from the Department ($9.5k), that’s $21.5k towards the salary of one grad student, that leaves $5.5k for everything else after one undergrad assistant (~$8k)

That’s giving Rick Mercer Seven Day Forecast vibes 😁

It’s almost as if he doesn’t understand how economies work