Innovation and the Senate Report on Science Policy

Innovation and the Senate Report on Science Policy IAN CHAPMAN and MICHAEL GIBBONS Rarely is public policy as openly and lengthily examined as was science policy in Canada between 1967 and 1973. The hearings and report of the Senate Special Committee on Science Policy provide us with a fascinating picture of that process . I The report reflects the assumptions of a period which saw the rise of science policy as a distinct policy area in most western nations. The cause of this sudden political interest in a hitherto neglected national resource - science and technology - was the vast expansion of science-based industry following the second world war, particularly in the U.S., an expansion which seemed to produce a parallel growth in national economic wellbeing. Economists such as Solow2 and Dennison3 added 'advances in knowledge' and 'technical progress' to capital and labour as inputs to growth. European nations became mesmerised by a perceived 'technology gap' between themselves and the U.S. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) collected national statistics which permitted member nations to gauge the success of their scientific efforts as they saw themselves ranked in myriad tables of indicators ranging froni patents to papers, expenditures to manpower. Somehow, these tables suggested, there had to be a 'right' level for everything, and more often than not the benchmark was the United States, the·nation which seemed to have harnessed science and technology most successfully to the service of national economk growth. Canada was an enthusiastic player in this game of follow the leader. In 1963 the Royal Commission on Government Organization (the Glassco Commission) noted Canada's low level of research spending compared to th_e U.K. and the U.S., and the particularly poor research and development (R&D) performance by Canadian industry compared with industry in the U.S.4 In company with the policy analysts of most western nations, the Commissioners assumed that a re30 organization of the existing policy-making bodies for science w_ould allow a redirection of scientific and technological resources along proper (i.e. U.S.) lines. This reorganization was not to come about easily. The organization of scientific R&D was only a small part of the Commission's report and was not accorded a high priority by the Pearson government. However, one member of that government was later to make science policy his particular interest in the Senate. Maurice Lamontagne was appointed to the Senate in 1966. His first important speech to that body in 1967 was a classic statement of all the then current assumptions about the role of science and technology in economic growth, and the value of the international comparisons which showed Canada's poor standing. Senator Lamontagne shared the assumption of the Glassco Commission that the existing policy bodies were at fault and that the first step to correct that situation was to reorganize and centralize policymaking for science. The ideas and assumptions which led to the establishment of the Senate Committee were popularly shared among many western nations and were evident in the Committee's report, but the report itself was no dispassionate examination of current research on public policy and science. The report was above all a document with political intent. Senator Lamontagne had clearly stated this political objective in his speech to the Senate even before the Committee came into existence. What was needed, he claimed, was the wresting of control over science policy from the existing agencies and the placing of that control in the hands of a strong central ministry of science and technology. It is our belief the Senate Committee tried to attain that political objective by using some of the contemporary thinking about the links between science and national economic growth. Our curiosity was aroused by what seemed to us inconsistencies in the Committee's approach to this question, inconsistencies which could not be explained by the possibility that recent research had forced the Committee to change its mind during the five-year period between the hearings Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 13, No. 1(Printemps1978 Spring) and the publication of the third and final volume of the report. Far from it. As we shall see, the Committee was very selective...