"What's a person gotta do to get an NSERC grant?"

Bertrand Clarke, formerly Professor of Statistics at UBC, now at the University of Miami, writes:

Yes, I can confirm that being zeroed out for an NSERC grant did affect my decision to go to the US. I was leaning that way anyway, but the NSERC decision just made it incredibly easy. In my view, the difference in the granting systems is one of the few objective reasons for staying in Canada and wrecking it makes Canadian universities much less competitive.

This from a researcher who published 14 papers between 2003 and 2009, including a 37 page paper (with a former student) in the Annals of Statistics, and an 800-page book on Machine Learning published in July by Springer.

"If NSERC is going to an NSF-style system, then..."

"I'll go to the US and take the two months extra salary"

This in a JSM conversation with a prominent Canadian researcher.