Dear colleagues,

I am forwarding a petition in support of SSHRC currently being circulated by Niki Ashton (NDP MP).   I hope you can all find a minute to sign this petition as this federal conservative directive has the potential to reduce significantly the support for students and faculty engaged in scholarship in the social sciences and humanities, education, environmental studies, fine arts and other areas not directly pertinent to business.

To the House of Commons in Parliament Assembled
We, the undersigned residents of Canada, wish to bring to your attention the following:

For more than thirty years, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has been promoting and supporting university-based research and training in the humanities and social sciences. SSHRC funding has been used to complete ground breaking research in countless areas in Canada and around the world.

The Federal Budget presented on January 27th contains a sentence that has the potential to halt this kind of research: “Scholarships granted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council will be focused on business-related degrees”.

These measures are backward and insulting to the thousands of Canadians that are students and researchers in the social sciences and humanities.

THEREFORE, we petitioners are calling upon the government to remove this sentence from the 2009 Budget and ensure that SSHRC funding not be allocated to one specific discipline but to the range of studies in the social sciences and humanities.

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to sign:

http://nikiashton.ndp.ca/sshrc