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Macleans.ca

Canada’s magazine

Norman Bethune: Canadian icon or communist villain (or merely something to talk about this week)?

Conservative MP Rob Anders is displeased with the Harper government’s decision to provide funding for the Bethune Memorial House.

Just another debate about evolution and autoerotic asphyxiation

During debate in the House on Tuesday of an NDP motion concerning the value of science, Bruce Hyer asked Gary Goodyear, the minister of state for science, if he believed in evolution (Mr. Goodyear’s views on evolution were sort of a thing a few years ago).

Where you need to go in this town for a good idea

Science and technology minister Gary Goodyear was at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto to fulfill a commitment the feds made in their most recent budget: he launched a review of Canada’s policies regarding business R&D. As David Akin points out in his Sun Media column today, the problem is simple enough: Canadian researchers are far better at producing new ideas than Canadian businesses are at implementing them. (Here’s a column I wrote in which John Manley expounds on similar themes.) Far too much effort has gone in recent years into fine-tuning (read “fiddling clumsily with”) the research that goes on in university laboratories. This review attempts to get things right: it looks at the very substantial federal aid on offer to businesses that want to engage in R&D, and asks why so little of that assistance is taken up and why it hasn’t produced a culture of constant innovation.