Canadian Grant Agency Threatened on Controversial Conference

An official in Canada's Science Ministry sent an e-mail to the country's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council suggesting that its grant to support a controversial York University conference on the Middle East would make it difficult for the agency to support budget increases for the council. The e-mail was revealed by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which criticized it as an unreasonable intrusion by the government into the grant-awarding process. The council issued a statement to The Globe and Mail saying that the e-mail was inaccurate.