There’s so much you can do with two million dollars in government grant money! This post’s headline is a partial list of some of the ideas Daniel Kwok, a Canadian engineering professor at the University of Calgary, and recipient of many grants from that country’s main technology funder, came up with.

It’s a long list because Canada is very, very slow. Very, very slowly that country gears up to … uh… what? Somebody reports something to someone… stuff is passed along to the police whose investigation … uh…

The documents point to major problems with oversight of Canada’s multibillion-dollar research system — holes so glaring that one leading ethics expert says he hopes the case will jolt federal politicians into giving “marching orders” to Canada’s research councils and universities to get their acts together.

“There is a public accountability here that is just missing,” says Michael McDonald, founding director of the centre for applied ethics at the University of British Columbia.

… [Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council] officials, four years after the investigations into Kwok’s conduct began, took the most drastic sanction at their disposal. In September 2009 they cut off all Kwok’s grants indefinitely, accusing him of plagiarism and misuse of funds in 2005 or before.

McDonald says it’s hard to fathom why it took NSERC so long to act.

“Four years is way too long for something of this kind,” he says. Buying stereos, TVs and car parts with science grants seems such an “egregious” breach of the rules that someone with a fifth-grade education can understand it, he says: “It’s obvious, a no-brainer.”

Canada’s slow, but Kwok is fast:

… Documents released by NSERC show that by 2005 the university had launched investigations into allegations of “financial misconduct” and “scientific misconduct” involving “plagiarism.”

Kwok did not wait around for the results of the investigations. In the spring of 2005, he … stunned his colleague[s] with the news that he was moving to the University of Calgary, leaving the Edmonton engineering department scrambling to pick up his teaching load and graduate students.

… More than half the money was awarded after his conduct in Edmonton had come under scrutiny and he had moved to Calgary.

The university kept it quiet. The NSERC passed the buck. The scientist pulled in more government money for his subwoofer.

[The University of Alberta] made a deal with the researcher: in the “event of timely repayment” of the money spent on car parts, phones, electronic gadgets and entertainment systems, the university would not pursue restitution for other questionable purchases made with research grants.

The researcher gave $24,676.33 to the University of Alberta’s lawyers in the fall of 2006, “subject to reaching agreement on suitable terms of a release and a confidentiality agreement.”

The University of Alberta returned $21,485.67 to NSERC and another $3,000 to other agencies that had financed the research.

In keeping with the federal policy for dealing with possible fraud, NSERC then turned the case over to the [police] in 2006 to investigate “the misuse of the $24,000 grant funds and also the possibility that more than this amount was misused.”

The documents show that NSERC officials initially decided no sanctions should be taken against the scientist or red flags put on his file until the [police] completed [their] investigation — a position that some found infuriating.

“This person is still receiving NSERC money, in spite of highly unethical behaviour,” one scientist wrote…

The long article is an hilarious compendium of no comments and it’ll take years for us even to begin investigating — all of this from universities, the police, the government… Meanwhile, Kwok remains at Calgary in good standing.

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While his university thinks he’s great, this man’s students seem to disagree. Kwok’s too busy with his subwoofer to teach…

But hey – the question of whether this guy can teach lies at the bottom of a very large stack of other questions. I’m sure Calgary will get to it eventually.