At the same time, we must emphasize that Canadian astronomy currently lacks several major strategic capabilities that our partner nations enjoy. In comparison with our counterparts in other industrialized nations, Canadian astronomers in 1999 have little access to space based observatories, few means with which to train instrument builders and produce small instruments for the future observatories, and suffer funding levels that are anomalously low and completely insufficient to enable our participaton in the new world-scale observatories that will dominate the coming decades of astronomy.

In this chapter, we take a comprehensive look at the current Canadian astronomy research community: the range of facilities that it employs, the impact that its people have made in using them, and its success in training new generations of skilled technical people and scientists.