Canada Research Coordinating Committee releases 2020–21 progress report

The Canada Research Coordinating Committee (CRCC) has released its 2020–21 progress report, Collective Response. The report illustrates how Canada’s federal research funding organizations worked together to meet the challenges facing Canadians and Canada’s research community due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The CRCC member organizations supported rapid response research while extending deadlines and funding, sharing research knowledge, advancing joint strategies, engaging a broad spectrum of research strengths to respond to the pandemic and its impacts, and providing emergency funds to help sustain research investments and the research community. At the same time, they continued to advance work on the six strategic priorities for Canadian research:

• supporting Canada’s research response to COVID-19
• strengthening equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in research
• strengthening Indigenous self-determination, leadership and capacity in research and training
• supporting early career researchers (ECRs)
• increasing engagement in interdisciplinary, international, high-risk, rapid-response research
• enhancing interagency cooperation on international research

The report’s annexes include data on shared performance indicators for EDI and ECR initiatives at the three federal research funding agencies and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.