The US and Canada have very different systems for funding science. To compare them, I found some of the publicly available data on NIH R01s (USA) and NSERC Individual Discovery Grants (Canada), and plotted them below. Before describing the results, I should say that comparing NIH to NSERC is a bit like comparing apples to oranges, since NSERC is probably closer to the NSF than to the NIH. Nevertheless, the cross-country trends hold up across agencies, and in any case my goal is not to compare...
