The Principal's column

It has been quite some time since a government budget, provincial or federal, has contained good news for Quebec or Canadian universities. Therefore, I am pleased that the 1997 federal budget announced last week does feature a number of new initiatives dealing with university research, student aid and charitable donations that are, indeed, auspicious for the Canadian academic community.

It is true that the budget does not address the really central fiscal problem facing Canadian universities, i.e., the maintenance of high quality teaching and research programs in the face of dramatic reductions in government operating grants and inadequate provisions for the federal funding councils.

It does, however, set up a new Canada Foundation for Innovation, an arm's-length agency chaired by Dr. John Evans, president of Allelix Biopharmaceuticals Inc. and past president of the University of Toronto, whose mandate will be to help modernize university research infrastructures (including libraries). Matching funds will be required for an institution to benefit from this program, but at least the incentive to participate is in place.

The budget proposal also renews on a more permanent basis the national Networks of Centres of Excellence program in which McGill is so admirably and visibly involved.

The steps announced to assist students are also a positive move, especially the decision to extend the loan repayment grace period after graduation to three years, which will benefit McGill students from outside Quebec. There are tax measures designed to lighten the burden for all student taxpayers and their families, including extending the education tax credit to cover university-initiated ancillary fees, and the new arrangements for Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs). I think these measures reflect the results of what I regard as a successful lobby mounted by a coalition of student groups, the AUCC, community colleges, professors and administrators.

Finally, although it would have been even more motivational had it come before rather than after the Twenty-First Century Fund Campaign, the promise to improve tax treatment for charitable donations should help McGill in its quest for support from private sector partners.

Whatever the merits of any specific budget provision, I think that we should be heartened by the strong signal which the 1997 federal budget sends regarding the importance to our common future of Canadian universities and the whole teaching and research enterprise.

We must work toward sustaining the momentum in future budgets at both the federal and provincial level. As is appropriate to Canada's constitutional arrangements, it is at the provincial level that the central funding problem will be resolved.

In the meantime, I believe we should welcome the federal initiatives, not because they are in any sense a full solution even to those problems that they directly address, but because they represent, in my view, a higher public priority for our work than has been evident in recent years.

In the weeks and months immediately ahead, we will need to grapple with the details of how we at McGill can work together to maximize our access to the programs that have been announced. If successful, we will have made some noticeable progress toward our goal of sustaining our commitments--academic, administrative and fiscal--in the face of the budgetary pressures to which we continue to be subjected.