This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
Canada: 
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A report released today has deduced that Canadian universities have been making multimillion-dollar research deals with business and private donors, which shall prompt “alarm bells,” and result in failing to sustain academic freedom. The extensive report points out that it found 12 suspicious collaborations at universities across Canada. It revealed that ten of them received a failing grade as the “universities have agreed to various violations of their own academic integrity.”
The report highlighted a $9-million deal with several universities, including The University of B.C., makes them “bound” to the interests of drug maker Pfizer Inc. On the other hand, the report said that The University of Alberta has agreed to a $13-million oilsands research program that “will focus on areas of strategic interest to Imperial Oil,” while a Quebec consortium for aerospace research raises the spectre of turning universities into “outlying branches of industry.” The report exposed that these deals enable outside partners to “co-opt” roles which should be indivisibly played by academics alone. It said that schools have also permitted “direct and indirect restrictions on the creation and dissemination of knowledge.”
CAUT concluded the report after obtaining and examining 12 agreements, some of which were redacted and were sought under access to information. Though the agreements were not revealed, the 192-page report was pretty elaborative. In the end remarks, CAUT executive director and co-author of the report, James Turk, stated that “none of this stuff should be secret and almost all of them were.” He added that “there should be complete transparency in any academic relationship a university enters in to.”
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