The idea is that with the help of the $60 million subsidy from the federal Technology Partnerships Canada program, PMC will spend $290 million of its own to develop cancer vaccines. If the cancer vaccines succeed, taxpayers could strike it rich, for the federal government would get an undisclosed share of the billions of dollars of expected royalties. This investment in the future on behalf of Canadian taxpayers follows on the heels of similar, though larger, research subsidies to the American aircraft engine maker Pratt and Whitney ($150 million) and to the two subsidiaries of the Bombardier empire Canadair and DeHavilland ($143 million combined). In addition, these two subsidiaries have in the past absorbed over $2 billion of federal bail-out money.

This generosity with our hard-earned money to gamble in the high-stakes, high-risk Casino Federal de Technologie raises a number of questions. The first of which is why it is at all necessary to improve upon the Western world's most friendly industrial R&D tax regime. In Canada, tax write-off provisions, combined with provincial and federal tax credits, drive down the cost of the corporate research dollar to between 45 and 60 cents. No other government makes research this cheap to perform.

The plausible answer is that while corporate R&D tax credits, reaching about $2 billion annually, are the Canadian taxpayer's largest gift to industry, they are not sufficiently visible to an electorate still impressed by the glamour of hi-tech. The occasional futuristic announcement of government largesse toward science comforts us with the thought that economic superweapons are being assembled like V-2 rockets. The degree of ignorance and the costs of getting information are especially high for this kind of policy for the average voter. This provides the politician with the opportunity to serve special interest groups, while enhancing his own standing with the voter.

A government that did not have its heart in the pockets of special interests would have asked two basic questions before splurging the taxpayers' $60 million. Can PMC prove it needs the subsidy, and does it deserve the subsidy? PMC would have needed the subsidy if it could have demonstrated that without government help it would not have invested in vaccine research. It is doubtful that Ottawa pressed PMC hard on this question, since Ottawa was falling over itself to hand the money to PMC before the government of France could do the same for this poster child of the vaccine industry. Did PMC deserve the money? It might have, provided that no other company in Canada could have undertaken the research without subsidy. This does not seem to be the case. An Alberta company called Biomira has raised $225 million for its own research into cancer vaccines, and another Alberta firm seems to be active in the same area.

According to its glossy brochure, Technology Partnerships Canada is designed to enhance wealth creation by making Canadian firms more innovative. The case of Pasteur Merieux Connaught demonstrates how little Ottawa trusts Canadians to do the job by themselves, without the assistance of a large bureaucracy that churns money extracted from taxpayers. Technology Partnerships will have $250 million annually to spend from next year on. Why not issue refundable tax credits of that amount directly to Canadians? Anyone who invests in a risky technological adventure will bear the risk himself and get the full reward. More prudent investors will put their money in blue-chip stocks. In the end, $60 million will have been diversified according to the needs and insights of many individual investors. As it stands, the gift to Pasteur Merieux Connaught is like a throw of the dice across a high technology craps table, with you, dear taxpayer, picking up the tab.