On May 15, the federal government created the Canada Research Continuity Emergency Fund (CRCEF) as part of a suite of temporary financial aid programs to help employers and workers through financial challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The government will provide universities and health-research institutions with $450 million for wage relief for research personnel and to help reduce costs associated with maintaining and ramping up essential research activities.
CRCEF is a tri-agency program administered by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. On Friday, the three granting councils’ websites went down and weren’t accessible again until Sunday. Because of the extended website outage, the tri-agency have extended the CRCEF phase one deadline to July 7.