Top American scientists just lost their jobs. Canada is rolling out the welcome mat

This story is part of CBC Health’s Second Opinion, a weekly analysis of health and medical science news emailed to subscribers on Saturday mornings. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.

Many top scientists in the U.S. are now out of a job.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is aiming to cut 20,000 jobs at agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration FDA).

Not all of them are scientists, but Canada could have a role to play in making sure American scientists are able to continue their research, say researchers on both sides of the border. 

Anecdotally, Canadian academics say they’re hearing daily from American colleagues looking for job opportunities in Canada. 

One example: Dr. Madhukar Pai, the director of the McGill global health programs, told CBC News he’s expecting a record number of applicants for a new tenure-track job in his department, opening in the coming weeks. It’s a field hit especially hard amid sweeping cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development that are slashing life-saving programs across the world tackling diseases like HIV and malaria. 

Scientists overseeing cancer research, vaccine and drug approvals, public health and tobacco regulations are also among 10,000 already laid off. Public health experts say the mass firings could have catastrophic impacts for the U.S. and the world. 

“Some of the top public health experts in the world just lost their jobs,” said former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden.

Without the CDC, more people will get sick with infectious diseases, and potentially die, in the US and around the world — including Canada, he said. 

“There are risks to Canada — and possibilities for Canada to step up.”

Kevin Griffis, a former CDC communications director, resigned in protest two weeks ago after three years at the agency. He said the mass firings were widely felt and could have unanticipated consequences. 

If the agency needed to hold a press conference today about a major public health threat, “there’s no one who even knows how to run the sound anymore. Because they fired the studio team,” he said.

Cuts to U.S. research funding will also create gaps in evidence because there’ll be less research being funded and conducted overall, says Kirsten Patrick, the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). That’s why it’s all the more important for Canada to step up its research funding, she says. 

“If we have a situation where, down south, research is not being as well funded as it should be and some research isn’t even being done, then we need to have a strong research system in Canada,” she said.

Provinces ‘rolling out the welcome mat’

Canadian provinces are already trying to attract American health experts suddenly out of a job.

Manitoba is “rolling out the welcome mat” for U.S. trained doctors, nurses and researchers affected by the cuts, said Minister of Health Uzoma Asagwara in a statement to CBC.

The province is currently talking to over a dozen physicians in the U.S. who are interested in making the move, Asagwara said.

They are also in the process of developing a “fulsome U.S. recruitment campaign in the coming weeks.”

British Columbia also says it’s keeping an eye on the latest developments in the US. A Health Ministry spokesperson said in a statement it will “provide what support [it] can” to American colleagues, so they can continue their crucial work. BC, too, is actively recruiting U.S. health professionals.

In Toronto, University Health Network is also set to announce its strategy to attract top scientists Monday. 

But other groups are also trying to recruit the same scientists: Frieden, the former CDC director, has already extended an offer to a fired government scientist for the non-profit he now runs, Resolve to Save Lives.

Local and state governments in the U.S. are also trying to snap up fired federal workers — not to mention universities around the world. 

But Canada is well positioned among the competition. We already punch above our weight when it comes to research, says Stephanie Michaud, CEO of BioCanRx, a research network that focuses on developing immune therapies to fight cancer. It received $40 million in federal funding between 2015 and 2019 — and $109.5 million in funding from others, like industry partners, provinces and charities.

“We have excellent researchers and excellent clinicians that already work here,” she said, pointing out that Canadian researchers tend to publish prolifically.

Where Canada could do better, she says, is in translating discoveries into treatments through clinical trials and, eventually, into practice. 

“What it takes in terms of investments to get a discovery that’s been found, published in a Canadian lab and take it towards a clinical trial. This is where Canada [has] a harder time,” she said. 

As American scientists look at other countries to continue their work, it’s an opportunity for Canada to tackle that weakness, by listening to scientists and clinicians and investing in more research — making Canada more attractive to top talent. 

Canada funds much less research than the United States per capita, according to analysis from the Canadian Association for Neuroscience. From 2020 to 2021, the NIH funded approximately $55.7 billion Cdn in research. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, in comparison, funded $1.44 billion. Even considering the U.S. population is about nine times larger than Canada’s, that’s a 39-fold difference.

“I think we have all of the right ingredients, we just need to bring all of the pieces together,” said Michaud. 

Increasing research funding 

Another strategy Canada could take: making it easier for researchers working in Canada to keep the lights on in their labs, says Dr. William Ghali, the vice president of research at the University of Calgary. 

In Canada, if a researcher gets a federal grant, the government also sets aside some money to cover costs like hiring support staff, operating and maintaining labs or paying for computer/data servers.

But it gets paid out to universities annually, untethered to any individual researchers or grants — and it’s not enough money in the end to cover the costs of everything that makes the research possible, according to Ghali.

Ghali says it’s a good moment for Canada to reconsider our approach. He says those indirect costs make a huge difference for researchers — and guaranteeing good indirect funding will attract top talent from outside Canada. 

That, in turn, will benefit all Canadians, he says: scientific growth leads to economic growth. 

A research partnership, changed

But underpinning the sense of opportunity, there’s also grief.

But scientists leaving the U.S. because they don’t feel safe or supported in their country is sad, according to Ghali, who says it feels like a blow against global co-operation. 

Dr. Pai, the director of the McGill Global Health Programs, says he feels uncomfortable with the idea of poaching American scientists. 

“American scientists deserve to work in their own country, not leave their families, feel safe in their own country, be adequately funded [and] respected and rewarded,” he wrote on BlueSky. 

But it’s a new reality that the world is reckoning with: the U.S. cannot be depended upon to fulfil the role it has for decades. It’s a lesson economists are learning in the wake of “Liberation Day” tariffs. Scientists are warning that the same lesson awaits in health and medical research.

“There is an opportunity for Canada to reshape its global partnerships, perhaps gain closer ties with Europe, perhaps become stronger in terms of cohesion within Canada,” said Ghali.