We need a return to funding basic research

Scientific breakthroughs have invariably started in what a bean-counter might dismiss as wool-gathering.

Great scientists, like Albert Einstein, left, and Alexander Graham Bell, tend to be interested in the world of the mind, not how to mine the world, writes Elizabeth May.Orren Jack Turner photo courtesy of Library of Congress, Moffett Studio photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada

Opinion

BY ELIZABETH MAY

November 23, 2016

It was in the spring 2012 budget that the previous Conservative government established the primacy of utilitarian, mercantile science over basic research and pure intellectual inquiry. The budget decreed that federal funds would go to research that was “business-led [and] industry-relevant.” T...

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