OTTAWA--By cutting funding to the research granting agencies, the federal government has betrayed the research community and damaged the ability of Canadian universities to undertake innovative research. Losses to the base budgets of granting councils more than offset the gains made by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and graduate students under the Canada Graduate Scholarships."For university researchers, this is the worst federal budget in more than a decade," said Graham Cox, Chairperson of the National Graduate Student Caucus. "It boggles the mind that Minister Flaherty can imagine a prosperous Canada with less innovative university research."

The federal budget announces $148M in cuts to the granting councils over the next three years. In addition to cuts to core research funding, the budget shifts funding to graduate scholarships asymmetrically across disciplines. Graduate students in the social sciences and humanities, who comprise approximately 50% of all graduate students, will not benefit from the scholarship increase unless they are business students.

In addition to measures designed to ease the financial burden faced by American students, the U.S. stimulus package proposed by President Barak Obama includes a $3 billion investment in the National Science Foundation, $3.5 billion for the National Institutes of Health and $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. In total, President Obama is recommending increasing research funding in the U.S. by $12.5 billion.

"In light of the university research renaissance in the United States and elsewhere, it is clear Canada needs to prioritise graduate student funding to keep pace," said Cox. "But this government has chosen to interfere in the grant selection process and ignore advice from researchers."

The National Graduate Caucus of the Canadian Federation of Students represents over 60 000 graduate students.