"Funeral for our career": Trump's science reduces the spread in Canadian territory

Researchers in Canada are preparing for turbulence due to changes in US funding, but there is also a good lining.

As U.S. scientific policy continues to change under the administration of President Donald Trump, the consequences go beyond national borders. In Canada, researchers feel fever. Canadian scientists are among the leading researchers in North and South America and receive funding from American agencies either directly or through international partnership. As a result, they were not spared the reduction of funding and job losses that torment their American colleagues.

For Jeff Cardill, a landscape ecologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, the trend is clear: all US-funded international projects in which he participates have been cut since January. These studies have focused on deforestation and changes in land use, but Cardill does not want to give more detailed information so as not to jeopardize the work of his colleagues.

"It's strange," he says. "Two months ago, I would have been happy to talk" about work. "Now I don't feel comfortable, even mentioning the existence of these things."

The loss of these projects disrupts not only his work, but also the work of his students, who planned to make them part of their scientific training. "I just hired a graduate student from Mexico, now I don't know what I can promise her in terms of research experience," he says.

Elena Bennett, an environmentalist at McGill University (and Cardill's wife), also knows about several international projects that have been closed, including some in which she participated. She also doesn't dare to say more.

"Some have just been told 'you're done, move on,'" Bennett says. "Others are not sure whether they will continue to receive funding if they still have a job. Everything is suspended until we see how it shakes up."

Uncertainty and, it would seem, the random nature of cuts and layoffs will affect the victims. "Every time I call Zoom, another person appears who is crying," says Cardill. "Every meeting is like a funeral of our career."

Long-standing references

There is a long history of close partnership and cooperation in science between Canada and the United States, says Chad Gaffield, executive director of U15, a group of some of Canada's most resource-intensive universities, in Ottawa. But in recent years, many countries have begun to focus more on their own domestic potential to strengthen their sovereignty, allowing them to participate internationally without leaving them vulnerable to geopolitical shifts.

"There is no doubt that the world of research is global, but as we learned during the pandemic, we do not live in a global village," he says. "No matter how intertwined we are, borders are still of great importance."

Researchers in Canada receive funding from various U.S. financial agencies, but the largest share comes from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. In fiscal year 2023, Canada received more than 90 NIH awards, which amounted to approximately 60 million Canadian dollars ($45 million). The total research budget of the Canadian Institutes of Medical Research (CIHR) is about 1.3 billion Canadian dollars.

According to a representative of the university, McGill University researchers and its affiliates are currently leading 7 NIH-funded projects and collaborating on another 86 that lead agencies in the United States. In fiscal year 2023, about 2% of the total funding for McGill's research came from American sponsors, says Dominic Berube, McGill's vice president of research and innovation, so the direct financial consequences of any reductions at the university will be limited. "Reducing this amount will not greatly affect the university, but it may affect people who are more connected with their American employees," she says.

Other institutions, such as the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, are in a similar situation. "Of the total funding for UBC research, only about 1% comes from the NIH of the United States," says a representative of the university. The University of Toronto is aware of several canceled grants and continues to closely monitor the situation, the press secretary reports. But they add: "At the moment, it is still too early to fully assess the impact of the current uncertainty for our researchers receiving funding from U.S. government sources, as well as for any research collaboration with colleagues in the United States."

Vincent Poitou, Vice-Rector for Research at the University of Montreal, says that the university receives from 4 to 5.5 million Canadian dollars a year from NIH. "This is not an insignificant amount at all," he says. Part of Paut's own diabetes research is funded by part of a four-year NIH grant, known as a sub-award, owned by a colleague from the University of California, Davis. This year, part of the award arrived in mid-April, about a month later than usual. The timing was accesual: the NIH policy, published on May 1, stipulates that all grants, including foreign sub-awards, should be suspended until a new formula for such awards is released in the fall. "Fortunately, our own grant seems to be safe, but others have been reduced," he says.

However, Poitou says that uncertainty about whether funding will continue after the fall is almost worse than knowing that it will be reduced, especially for doctoral and graduate students who are working on the grant. "It's starting to create chaos, making people so worried that they are paralyzed," he says. "But I will never make my students pay the price, I will find a way to continue their education."

Not only the potential loss of grant money affects researchers in Canada, says Sarah Laframboise, executive director of the Evidence for Democracy campaign group in Ottawa. She says that the reduction in funding and staff disrupts many key connections in joint research projects, with Canadian researchers sometimes suddenly losing touch with their American counterparts.

She says that a significant reduction in the staff of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has hampered cooperation in fisheries management and may disrupt the data exchange that Canada relies on for weather forecasting and disaster management. "The loss of this data will be very harmful not only for researchers, but also for ordinary Canadians," says Laframboise.

Laframboise is also concerned about the Trump administration's repression in areas of research that are considered "political", such as everything related to climate, environment, race and sex. Many sponsors, including the NIH, now have lists of words that can provoke the consideration of grant applications.

"I'm worried about the politicization of these words and subject areas, and about whether these ideological shifts can come to Canada," she says.

This concern is not unfounded. Some researchers in Canada who work on U.S.-funded projects were sent a questionnaire to determine how their work fits the Trump administration's political agenda, including whether the work contains components of climate justice; diversity, equality and inclusion; or gender ideology. In April, the Canadian cancer research group participating in the NIH clinical trial network was forced to exclude gender-inclusive language from its test reports.

This message also got into the political discourse of the country. During the election campaign in the Canadian elections in April, the leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, Pierre Poilivre, promised to put an end to "the imposition of an enduring ideology in the allocation of federal funds for university research". On April 28, the Conservatives lost the elections of the Liberal Party led by Mark Carney, which took a tougher line against Trump.

Possibility of hiring

Although the riots in the United States have spread to Canada, there is also a silver lining - this provided a potential opportunity to attract talented American researchers looking for international career options. A March survey on the Nature website showed that more than three quarters of respondents are considering leaving the United States for Europe or Canada due to failures caused by the Trump administration.

"We were very dependent on the U.S. system, but Canada may have an important opportunity to restore itself in many areas of research," says Berube. Online discussions focused on how Canada can benefit from the outcome of talent from the United States began to spread. Poitou says that some American colleagues have already contacted him about a potential move.

Canada already has programs to attract foreign research talents. Canadian Research Chairs (CERC) offer either 1 million Canadian dollars or 500,000 Canadian dollars a year for 8 years, specially designed to attract world-class researchers who are interested in moving their laboratories to a Canadian university. The program is not offered every year, but the last competition opened in January 2025, in which about 25 positions are available.

And the Liberal Party's election promises included a proposal to create a Canadian Foundation for Sovereignty and Sustainability Studies to attract researchers affected by policy changes in the United States.

But Jim Woodgett, a cell biologist at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto, says that the CERC program may not be the best tool for building Canada's scientific capacity in the long term. In many cases, previous winners left Canada when the award ended because there were not enough funds for them to stay, he says.

Instead, Woodgett says that universities should focus on a younger group of scientists who are looking for their first independent award. They are the ones most likely to see their careers being disrupted by funding cuts, and are at a stage in their lives where they are more likely to settle down to spend the rest of their careers in Canada. "There are thousands of them, and they will be destroyed by NIH abbreviations," says Woodgett. "These are the people we should be guided by."

Some institutions are already moving in this direction. In April, the Toronto University Health Network launched a campaign to recruit 100 aspiring researchers whose research has good potential for commercialization. However, such recruitment campaigns will be difficult to expand across the country. Although the government provided an incentive to fund research in the federal budget for 2024, Canada's grant agencies do not have the financial capacity to increase funding for the inflow of new lead investigators. This is exacerbated by Canada's restriction on international students introduced last year, limiting the ability of universities to recruit American graduate students. "At the moment we are not in an ideal position, but I think our story says that we can get it back on the right track pretty quickly," says Gaffield.

Poitou says that if the government wants to intervene to help universities benefit from a potential brain drain from the United States, he already has a plan to do so. The 2023 Advisory Report, known as the Bouchard Report, recommended, among other things, increasing the budget of Canada's three major grant councils by 10% per year for five years to support the growing number of graduate and graduate students.

"I'm not saying it's possible, and I can't speculate on which government can implement it, but we have recommendations on the table that say that if we want to stay competitive, we have to make our game," Poitou says.

Berube says that universities also have other options when it comes to financing the recruitment of new teachers. Some provincial governments, including Quebec governments, have in the past had programs designed to support new professorships. Agencies can also use their graduate donor community to fund specific recruitment campaigns. "Many of our donors are now concerned about the situation in the United States and may be ready to support the relocation of these researchers to Canada," she says.

American researchers who want to move to Canada are likely to receive a warm welcome. Both Cardill and Bennett come from the United States and have been living and working in Canada for more than a decade. Such a move may have advantages for researchers who are concerned about the political direction in the United States. Bennett, for example, says that in Canada than in the United States, it is easier for her to communicate with politicians and politicians who will benefit from her work.

"Canadian society and science work somewhat differently than in the United States. It's quite similar to rhyme, but not the same," she says. "You have to get used to it, but in general I found it a really good place to work and live."