A senior federal official once told me that in his more irreverent moments he imagines founding a political vehicle called the GOAT party – Getting Our Act Together. One of the central tenets of the GOAT party would be to frankly address vital societal matters that have hitherto fallen between the cracks of the provincial and federal authorities and thus suffer the ignominious fate of a political football, condemned to irretrievable mediocrity in the dark valley of unaccountable bureaucracy.

A classic such issue centres around the current state of university funding, particularly for foreign graduate students. Education is considered largely a provincial matter and thus the vast majority of vital operational funds for post-secondary institutions is covered by provincial governments who typically provide operational supplements to universities on a per student basis, administer student loan programs and have the power to impose limits on tuition fees across the region. On the other hand university researcher’s grants are held through federal agencies such as NSERC and SSHRC, while additional federal agencies and mechanisms, such as the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Canada Research Chairs are pivotal to ensuring academic competitiveness. From these examples, one might be tempted to assume that the teaching and research functions of a university are evenly split between the provincial and federal government respectively, but it is hardly that simple. Federal scholarships, such as the newly created Millennium Scholarships play an important role in the educational process, while provincial research programs, such as the Ontario Research and Development Challenge Fund, Ontario Innovation Trust and Premier’s Research Awards substantially affect the prevailing research climate.

When the system is going well, such cost-sharing is regarded as a productive partnership. But when, as now, universities are under strain throughout the land and desperately struggling to maintain their competitive edge, who is to blame? And who is responsible for missed opportunities for improvement?

In a recent article in Maclean’s magazine (“Rowing With One Oar”), Paul Wells delivers a stinging indictment of our present inability to capitalize on a unique opportunity of gargantuan proportions: the decline in the American research culture. In America, foreign graduate student applications fell by a whopping 28% from 2002-03 to 2003-04. Individual state support for universities is declining, while proposed federal budget increases for basic research are less than inflation. Security measures imposed since 9/11 have made many prospective foreign graduate students feel unwelcome. For decades, the United States was the land of milk and honey for research excellence. Despite perpetually problematic national educational standards at the primary and secondary school levels, it consistently boasted the vast majority of the world’s leading universities and research centres by combining an unabashed commitment to excellence with an open door visa policy towards foreign overachievers. Today, you would be hard pressed to find very many noteworthy academics of any discipline who have not spent at least some portion of their career in the United States. But now that culture might finally be changing.

As a Canadian, you might think this would excite me. As it happens, it does not. Research is not an Olympic sport, and as a citizen of planet Earth I long for the day when science and scholarship are aggressively pursued at the highest levels in Wichita, Warsaw and Windhoek as well as Waterloo. But as a Canadian, I am gravely disappointed that we seem incapable of being able to capitalize on this singular opportunity to pick up the ball where the United States has so unceremoniously dropped it. With our unique combination of a high standard of living, ethnic tolerance and liberal immigration policies we are perfectly equipped to seize this moment to raise our universities to ever-increasing heights and assume a global leadership position in scientific research and scholarship. If we act quickly and coherently, we could soon bask in the glow of talented researchers from Singapore to Santiago flocking to our shores to pursue advanced degrees, branding Canada as a destination of academic excellence.

But the status quo must change. Right now there are very few resources for foreign graduate students in our universities. Increased federal and provincial scholarships for international scholars would hardly be a substantial line item in any budget, but would carry with it a statement of incalculable symbolic value that would shine like a beacon throughout an international scientific community that is searching for new bearings.

If only we could get our act together. Vote GOAT.