Connect with us
[bsa_pro_ad_space id=12]

Business

The Health Research Funding Scandal Costing Canadians Billions is Parading in Plain View

Published

8 minute read

The Audit

 David Clinton

Why Can’t We See the Canadian Institutes for Health Research-Funded Research We Pay For?

Right off the top I should acknowledge that a lot of the research funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) is creative, rigorous, and valuable. No matter which academic category I looked at during my explorations, at least a few study titles sparked a strong “well it’s about time” reaction.

But two things dampen my enthusiasm:

  1. Precious few of the more than 39,000 studies funded by CIHR since 2011 are available to the public. We’re generally permitted to see no more than brief and incomplete descriptions – and sometimes not even that.
  2. There’s often no visible evidence that the research ever actually took place. Considering how more than $16 billion in taxpayer funds has been spent on those studies over the past 13 years, that’s not a good thing.

If you’ve been reading The Audit for a while, you know that I’ll often identify systems that appear vulnerable to abuse. As a rule though, I’m reluctant to invoke the “s” word. But here’s one place where I can think of no better description: the vacuum where CIHR compliance and enforcement should be is a national scandal.

Keep these posts coming: subscribe to The Audit.

I’ve touched on these things before. And even in that earlier post I acknowledged how:

…as a country, we have an interest in investing in industry sectors where there’s a potential for high growth and where releasing proprietary secrets can be counter productive.

So we shouldn’t expect access to the full results of every single study. But that’s surely not true for the majority of research. And there’s absolutely no reason that CIHR shouldn’t provide evidence that something (anything!) productive was actually done with our money.

Because a well-chosen example can sometimes tell the story better than huge numbers, I’ll focus on one particular study in just a moment. But for context, here are some huge numbers. What follows is an AI-powered breakdown by topic of all 39,751 research grants awarded by CIHR since 2011:

Those numbers shouldn’t be taken as anything close to authoritative. The federal government data doesn’t provide even minimal program descriptions for many of the grants it covers. And many descriptions that are there contain meaningless boilerplate text. That’s why the “Other – Uncategorized” category represents 72 percent of all award dollars.

Ok. Let’s get to our in-the-weeds-level example. In March 2016, Greta R. Bauer and Margaret L. Lawson (principal investigators) won a $1,280,540 grant to study “Transgender youth in clinical care: A pan-Canadian cohort study of medical, social and family outcomes”.

Now that looks like vital and important research. This is especially true in light of recent bans on clinical transgender care for minors in many European countries following the release of the U.K.’s Cass report. Dr. Cass found that such treatment involved unacceptable health risks when weighed against poorly defined benefits.

A website associated with the Bauer-Lawson study (transyouthcan.ca) provides a brief update:

As of December of 2021, we have completed all of our planned 2-year follow up data collection. We want to say thanks so much to all our participants who have continued to share their information with us over these past years! We have been hard at work turning data into research results.

And then things get weird. That page leads to a link to another page containing study results, but that one doesn’t load due to an internal server error.

Before we move on, I should note that I come across a LOT of research-related web pages on potentially controversial topics that suddenly go off-line or unexpectedly retire behind pay walls. Those could, of course, just be a series of unfortunate coincidences. But I’ve seen so many such coincidences that it’s beginning to look more like a pattern.

The good news is that earlier versions of those lost pages are nearly always available through the Internet Archive’s WayBackMachine. And frankly, the stuff I find in those earlier versions is often much more – educational – than whatever intentional updates would show me.

In the case of transyouthcan.ca, archived versions included a valid link to a brief PDF document addressing external stressors (which were NOT the primary focus of the original grant application). That PDF includes an interesting acknowledgment:

This project is being paid for by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). This study is being done by a team of gender-affirming doctors and researchers who have many years of experience doing community-based trans research. Our team includes people who are also parents of trans children, trans adults, and allied researchers with a long history of working to support trans communities.

As most of the participants appear to have financial and professional interests in the research outcome, I can’t avoid wondering whether there might be at least the appearance of bias.

In any case, that’s where the evidence trail stopped. I couldn’t find any references to study results or even to the publication of a related academic paper. And it’s not like the lead investigators lack access to journals. Greta Bauer, for example, has 79 papers listed on PubMed – but none of them related directly to this study topic.

What happened here? Did the authors just walk off with $1.2 million of taxpayer funding? Did they do the research but then change their minds about publishing when the results came in because they don’t fit a preferred narrative?

But the darker question is why no one at CIHR appears to be even mildly curious about this story – and about many thousands of others that might be out there. Who’s in charge?

Keep these posts coming: subscribe to The Audit.

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

Business

Trump says ‘nicer,’ ‘kinder’ tariffs will generate federal revenue

Published on

From The Center Square

By 

President Donald Trump says the slate of tariffs he plans to announce Wednesday will be “nicer,” “kinder” and “more generous” than other countries have treated the U.S.

Trump plans to unveil reciprocal tariffs on all nations that put duties on U.S. imports Wednesday, which the president has been calling “Liberation Day” for American trade.

Trump’s latest comments on tariffs come as he aims to reshape the global economy to reduce U.S. trade deficits and generate billions in federal revenue through higher taxes on imported products.

Trump’s trade policies have upended U.S. and global markets, but the president has yet to get into specifics ahead of Wednesday’s planned announcement.

At the start of March, Trump told a joint session of Congress that he planned to put reciprocal tariffs in place starting April 2.

“Whatever they tariff us, we tariff them. Whatever they tax us, we tax them,” Trump said. “If they do non-monetary tariffs to keep us out of their market, then we do non-monetary barriers to keep them out of our market. We will take in trillions of dollars and create jobs like we have never seen before.”

On Sunday night, Trump said on Air Force One that U.S. tariffs would be “nicer,” “kinder” and “more generous” than how other countries have treated the U.S.

Last week, Trump announced a 25% tariff on imported automobiles, duties that he said would be “permanent.” The White House said it expects the auto tariffs on cars and light-duty trucks will generate up to $100 billion in federal revenue. Trump said eventually he hopes to bring in $600 billion to $1 trillion in tariff revenue in the next year or two. Trump also said the tariffs would lead to a manufacturing boom in the U.S., with auto companies building new plants, expanding existing plants and adding jobs.

Trump predicts his protectionist trade policies will create jobs, make the nation rich and help reduce both trade deficits and the federal government’s persistent deficits.

The “Liberation Day” tariffs come after months of talk since Trump took office in January. On the campaign trail, Trump frequently called “tariff” the most beautiful word in the English language.

James Dorn, senior fellow emeritus at the Cato Institute, said Trump’s rhetoric on tariffs doesn’t match the economic reality of Americans.

“Tariffs expand the scope of government, politicize economic life, increase uncertainty, and reduce individual freedom,” he wrote. “Government officials gain arbitrary power while market participants face fewer opportunities for mutually beneficial exchanges and greater uncertainty as the rules of the game change.”

Dorn said consumers would pay the price.

“Tariffs are levied on U.S. importers as goods – both final and intermediate –subject to the tariff enter the country,” he wrote. “Importers and consumers typically end up paying the tariffs, as they cut into profit margins and drive consumer prices up.”

Business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Farm Bureau Federation, have urged Trump to back off tariff threats.

Trump has promised that his tariffs would shift the tax burden away from Americans and onto foreign countries, but tariffs are generally paid by the people who import the foreign products. Those importers then have a choice: absorb the loss or pass it on to consumers through higher prices. The president also promised tariffs would make America “rich as hell.”

Continue Reading

Business

Biden’s Greenhouse Gas ‘Greendoggle’ Slush Fund Is Unraveling

Published on

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Michael Chamberlain

We warned you: this gas didn’t smell right from the beginning.

The Greendoggle has made the big time! Not every shady government giveaway to special interests gets its own Wall Street Journal editorial.

But how often does the new EPA administrator announce that his staff has discovered that $20 billion that had been appropriated for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF or “Greendoggle”) had been “parked” in a bank by the Biden EPA until it could be ladled out as grants to climate industry cronies? That’s what Administrator Lee Zeldin announced back in February, referencing a Biden appointee who was infamously caught on tape explaining that the agency was “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” – trying to get the unspent money out of the reach of the Trump administration. Zeldin’s “clawing back” that money, and the lawsuit by “public-private investment fund” Climate United to get the $7 billion it was awarded, has got the media paying attention. Finally.

Administrator Zeldin’s announcement that EPA is taking back the $2 billion awarded to an organization tied to prominent political figures marks another auspicious turn in the GGRF saga, which Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) has followed and warned about since the beginning. Passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (Mr. Orwell, please call your office …), the GGRF was a massive spending program that would provide funds to environmentalist groups to finance green technology projects. The sheer amount of money Congress shoveled at the EPA was unprecedented. Unfortunately, it didn’t come with commensurate oversight resources – Mr. Zeldin says this was by design. The result was the Greendoggle, an environmentalist slush fund administered by insiders for insiders.

According to emails PPT obtained via FOIA request, the EPA invited a group of green activist organizations and thinktanks to a highly irregular November 2022 meeting to “provide early feedback on the RFI and ask clarifying questions.” And, as PPT foresaw, several groups with ties to EPA officials are on the invitation list. EPA’s “revolving door” with radical environmental groups spun fast in the Biden years.

PPT dug in and researched the green banks, finding multiple insider connections to the Biden administration. “With $27 billion dollars sloshing around, the American public should be on high alert for waste, fraud and abuse,” we warned in October 2023.

The next month, when the “short list” of coalitions vying to become GGRF distributors was announced, the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Nick Pope, whose reporting on the GGRF since early on has been essential in exposing the Greendoggle, revealed it featured “several organizations with considerable connections to the Biden administration, as well as the Democratic Party and its allies.” To put it mildly.

As the Greendoggle came together, the legacy media remained incurious, but for anyone paying attention, it smelled bad. There seemed to be no accountability, and given the Biden EPA’s ethical track record, that was concerning, to say the least.

One of the eight entities eventually chosen was the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC), a green bank whose mission is to “accelerate the deployment of clean energy technology throughout the US while maintaining a targeted focus on underserved markets.” CGC board member David Hayes left the organization for nearly two years to join the Biden White House Climate Policy Office as a special assistant to the president. He then went back to the CGC board. As PPT put it in a complaint it filed in June 2024 with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the EPA’s inspector general (and which the Zeldin EPA cited in its legal defense of the clawback), while at the White House Hayes “presumably worked at the highest level on the very GGRF program from which CGC sought funding upon his return. This timing is suspect considering CGC itself publicly announced his return to its board as part of its effort to obtain GGRF funding.” Not very subtle, but it worked. CGC got a $5 billion windfall out of the Greendoggle.

It just so happened that, while Mr. Hayes was in the administration, so was another CGC veteran, Jahi Wise. Like Hayes, Wise was a special climate assistant to the president, until he joined the EPA in December 2022 as … founding director of GGRF. Subtlety doesn’t seem to be among the skill sets CGC looks for in its people. Wise at least didn’t return to CGC after that. He joined a George Soros foundation.

The GGRF should become a metaphor for congressional shortsightedness, bureaucratic arrogance and the venality of special interests at the government trough. The “green” industry is an industry like any other, green special interests are special interests and the color of a taxpayer dollar doesn’t change because it’s being wasted in a nominally noble cause.

The Greendoggle stank, gas and all.

Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.

Continue Reading

Trending

X