It is important to set goals
and as President of CASCA for the next couple of years my priorities are:
Of course there is also the
smooth running of the many activities of the Society. For that I appreciate and am grateful for the
dedication and talents of the Board and of the many members who have stepped
forward for the important work on CASCA committees.
Just as
The Coalition is a
remarkable creation which continues to benefit from the dedication, talent, and
creativity of all its players. The goal
is to provide stable funding for the LRP to keep us in a leadership role on the
international scene. Getting a Memorandum
to Cabinet is challenging, as is finding a government in power long enough to
pass a budget with a long term science focus!
We continue to have good responses from individual MPs in all parties,
at the root of creating a climate of “favorable conditions.” Recent Coalition highlights include the
multi-agency Working Group, a supportive report from the Finance Committee, and
a private member’s motion to be debated in the House. There is much ongoing work to do.
As we develop the major facilities envisioned in the
LRP, we must keep in mind the “cradle to grave” costs. Major phases are concept and design,
construction, operation, and exploitation.
Even when construction costs can be obtained, operation costs can remain
a challenge because they are on a horizon longer than usual funding
commitments. On this same longer time scale
we need funding for doing the science that is enabled by these facilities,
often in collaboration or competition with our international partners. From an audit point of view, it would seem
irresponsible not to have funding mechanisms and levels that will ensure that
the best possible science is achieved. Science
exploitation is if fact central to what most in our community do, in our
research HQP training, and outreach, and so adequate funding is also essential
to the health and renewal of our science.
I think that we are still far from the ideal here, in part structurally
(see, e.g., the Working Group report), and that this aspect of the LRP is so
far proving to be the most challenging to deliver. We clearly need to make effective use of the
funding available through NSERC programs and to increase that funding. More funding is certainly needed as
recognized in the LRP. This is not greed. It is simply to ensure that the
ambitious projects already capitalized (mostly not even coordinated with NSERC)
can deliver effectively; otherwise, money will have been wasted and our
international partners will be the ones gaining from our joint
investment. Personally I think that the concept of an “envelope” of
funding specifically for astronomy and astrophysics has a lot of upside
potential. The idea of such an envelope
has been broached by NSERC since at least as early as 2001 but for various
reasons has never got much traction. I
think that it is high time to become seized of this possibility, molding it to
our needs or proposing some alternative that is even better. A community sufficiently mature and united to
have an LRP also needs to have planning tools like envelope funding in
place. Just as in other aspects of the
LRP, where nothing can be taken for granted, we must create opportunities to
take responsibility for our science. A
new discussion with NSERC is about to begin which the Board endorses (see
separate article). Unfortunately with the proposed timetable any changes would
be too late to address the long foreseen and pressing needs for exploitation of
Herschel, Planck, and the new instruments on JCMT.
Education and Outreach have been a strong suit in our
Society, thanks to individual efforts and the dedicated and enterprising
E&O Committee. It is clear to the
Board how much more could be done with appropriate levels of funding. This was highlighted in the LRP but so far
the potential has not been fulfilled. An
opportunity to rise to another level of activity is presented by the International
Year of Astronomy 2009. The Board has
put in place a new IYA2009 Committee that brings together the many stakeholders. Jim Hesser has
kindly agreed to be our point of contact with the IAU while further
organization takes place.
A persuasive case can be
made that progress in our science will depend more and more on the synergy
between ground and space-based activities.
While it might be ideal to have a single agency
– say an Astronomy Canada working with ACURA – to focus federal funding, the
situation now is that we deal with many agencies, still in a fractured way well
documented by the Working Group. That,
however, should not stop the Society from developing another decadal plan that
is clearly science driven. The Board has
supported the recent CSAW as a first essential step and commends the work of
the JCSA in this respect (see report by Rene Doyon). A great benefit for the Coalition as it
promotes the LRP is that it can rightly be said that our community has made
tough choices. That said, many of the
major facilities that we propose take more than a decade to put in place, and
on that timescale new opportunities surely arise with the potential to alter
the request for funding. Therefore,
along with decadal plans and mid-term reviews we might need to think of other
living structures, for which names like “framework” and “vision” have been used
in other jurisdictions.
These are busy times on many
fronts and 2008 will be no less so. If a
holiday opportunity comes your way, enjoy it!