The Province is providing $195M in funding in life sciences
Darpan News Desk The Canadian Press, 02 Mar, 2022 05:03 PM
The province is providing 195-million dollars in grant funding to help attract and retain top researchers in the life sciences field.
Jobs Minister Ravi Kahlon says Michael Smith Health Research B-C will get 116-million dollars while Genome BC will get the rest in order to spur innovation.
— Brenda Bailey, MLA (@BrendaBaileyBC) March 2, 2022
Kahlon says the province wants to leverage B-C's contributions to developing and manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines towards learning how to deal with future pandemics.
He says the funding could also help advance research in a range of areas including the development of new medications, rapid diagnostic tests for diseases and clean technology.Â
Mike Farnworth visited Princeton and said he saw "incredible devastation" to homes and infrastructure in the southern Interior town, about 280 kilometres east of Vancouver.Â
British Columbia's health minister says the province is "ahead of the curve" on recommendations by a national advisory group that Canadians ages 50 and older get a COVID-19 booster. Adrian Dix says his ministry announced weeks ago that it would start its booster program and already 470,000 people have had a third shot.Â
But Selina Robinson says the effects of the floods and extreme weather may affect the government's bottom line after she met today with the Economic Forecast Council, a 13-member private-sector group that is giving her advice before next spring's budget.
There are currently 3,071 active cases of COVID-19 in the province, and 214,047 people who tested positive have recovered. Of the active cases, 276 individuals are currently in hospital and 95 are in intensive care. The remaining people are recovering at home in self-isolation.
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault says the new federal climate plan won't be ready until the end of March. The net-zero accountability law passed in June requires the government to make public a greenhouse-gas emissions reduction plan for 2030 within six months.
Caroline McDonald-Harker, a professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Mount Royal University in Calgary, has studied the impacts of extensive flooding in southern Alberta in 2013 and the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire.
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