thinkers' conference

At a time when we may be witnessing a key moment in the reworking of the global higher education and research landscape, now would be a good time for some national leadership on Canada’s place in the competitive global knowledge economy. Unfortunately, some people are preoccupied with what a bunch of country lawyers wrote in a constitution 36 years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight. (UPDATE: That’s badly phrased. It should have said, “Unfortunately, some people want to duck their responsibilities based on a culpably sloppy misreading of a constitution a bunch of country lawyers wrote 36 years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight.” Fun exercise: Find the paragraph in the constitution that would ever limit the federal government’s role in science, research, commercialization, promoting entrepreneurship, marketing Canadian educational products abroad, promoting greater use of information and communications technology, and so on. Cite jurisprudence.) So it falls to the good folks at Perimeter Institute to provide the national leadership with what promises to be an ambitious conference on all this stuff — in spring, 2011. From the news release: