The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada
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REPORT OF THE SCIENCE ADVISORY COMMITTEE (SAC)

Presented to the 99th Annual General Meeting

PIPSC’s Science Advisory Committee (SAC) met three times thus far in 2018. During this time, the committee has been involved in the following:

As per the Board’s approved Strategic Plan on Science, the SAC continued to align its contributions, recommendations and discussions on its key activities:

  1. PIPSC Science Reports:  Defrosting Public Science, Women in Public Sector Science: From Analysis to Action & a tentative Science Capacity report/two-pager – Members of SAC were presented with some of the initial findings, helped with final comments and recommendations on the reports and contributed to spreading the findings to consultation teams, steward councils and members at large.
  2. Departmental Science Integrity Teams Working on SI Policies with Departments and TBS – SAC was kept in the loop on the development of the model policy and provided advice on next steps regarding eventual departmental implementation.
  3. Women in Science - SAC members looked at the recommendations & provided suggestions to PIPSC’s Board of Directors on how to implement the recommendations and move the file forward.
  4. Conference Attendance Initiative – The issue is still very active and members of SAC are involved in tracking denials at the member level. A tool for ERO’s was also developed by SAC to facilitate the recording of information in a denial case.
  5. State of Government Science Monitoring – SAC discussed and shared views on the Science Demographics effort from Government in defining what a Federal Scientist is.  SAC also explored at suggestions on implementation of science reports into future Government Relations activities.

A lot of work still lays ahead for the committee, especially within the scope of consultations surrounding Scientific Integrity policies and the ramifications stemming from the looming implementation deadline for departments set for the end of 2018.

Discussing and strategizing a new iteration of our Science Strategic Plan heading into 2019 is also imminent in the short-term.

Further areas of interest and potential activity for the long term at SAC are the following: 

  • Science Infrastructure;
  • Science Demographics: what is a federal scientist?
  • Artificial Intelligence in Science Based Departments;
  • Building bridges with the Chief Science Advisor;