Editorial Fun and games at the TIP TOP

Although it is easy to knock the government for all the crazy mistakes it makes, we’re tempted to bury the axe (for a moment, anyway) and tip our hardhats to Ottawa for its recent pragmatic initiatives concerning technology. By all appearances, these initiatives seem to be making government laboratories, such as the Canada Centre for Mineral and Energy Technology (canmet), more responsive to the needs of the mining industry. The intention, apparently, is to eventually privatize certain entities within canmet — especially those which could become commercially viable.

To witness the success of two fairly recent programs initiated by External Affairs and the Ministry of State for Science and Technology, you’d think the government was being run by a bunch of fat engineers, not lawyers.

The first program is called the Technology Inflow Program, or tip. “We encourage Canadian businesses, universities and government agencies (including canmet) to use Canada’s network of 17 diplomatic posts positioned worldwide, to find the technology they’re looking for (if it exists outside of Canada) and to arrange to have it brought to Canada where it can be implemented,” manager Brian Cox says.

In its 1 1/2-year history, a total of 150 medium- and small- sized business (about eight of them mining-related) have made requests for information on technology in other countries and 25 (about five mining-related) received funding from tip to implement the new technology. Canadian Bronze of Winnipeg, for example, used the program to bring U.S. technology for coating metals to Canada and Belkon, an Ontario company, brought coil wrapping technology here from Japan.

The second program is called the Technology Outreach Program, or top. This one is part of innovAction, the federal government’s strategy for science and technology which is designed to provide start-up money for new technology centres — like the ones at Laurentain University (the Centre for Mining and Mineral Exploration Research), the Technical University of Nova Scotia (Laboratory for Investigation of Minerals) and the University of British Columbia (the Centre for Metallurgical Process Engineering), for example.

To put some punch behind the lofty objectives of these programs, the federal government has increased tip’s annual budget to $2.85 million and increased, by $11 million, the amount of money available to match, dollar-for-dollar, funding provided by mining companies (and other industries) for research conducted in our universities.

The National Research Council, from which the mining industry receives considerable R&D funding, has a budget of $26 million this year for these increasingly popular industry/university research programs.

These funding initiatives, along with a new managerial regime for federal laboratories such as canmet, leave us with the impression this government knows what it’s doing. But as some insiders point out, there are still concerns that have not been answered. Why is there no review procedure, as there is in business, to assure the highest quality of work is performed at canmet, for example? Why is there no procedure to have work honestly criticized by a peer group of experts, as is the case in any profession?

While we applaud the government for its initiatives, we still wonder if it has the horses to pull off the new courses it has set out for itself. Now, where is that axe?