Science and Research Committee on April 16th, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

I call the meeting to order. This is meeting number 81 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the Standing Orders. All members are in the room, but we do have some witnesses on Zoom.

For those on Zoom, you can speak in the official language of your choice. You can choose floor, English or French at the bottom of your screen. If we do lose interpretation or sound quality, please let me know immediately and we will suspend while we restore interpretation.

For members participating in person, I'll recognize you before you speak and your mic will be controlled, as usual, by the proceedings and verification officer.

In the room we have a great sound system, but we need to keep our earphones away from the microphone so that we don't create feedback events. We can make sure we're mindful of that, protecting the safety of our interpreters as well as those in the room with earphones in.

All comments should come through the chair. Please speak slowly and clearly, and when you are not speaking your mic should be on mute.

We have a speaking list. The clerk and I will do the best we can to maintain the order of speakers.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(i) and the motions adopted by the committee on Tuesday, January 30, and Thursday, February 15, 2024, the committee resumes its study on the distribution of federal government funding among Canada's post-secondary institutions.

It's now my pleasure to welcome, in the room, from the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies, Philippe-Edwin Bélanger, president, and Dr. Fahim Quadir, vice-president. We have, virtually, from the Canadian Association of University Teachers, Dr. Robin Whitaker. We also have Dr. Eric Weissman from the Post-secondary Student Homeless/Housing Research Network on video conference.

You'll each have five minutes for your remarks and then we'll go to the questioning rounds.

Starting us off, we will hear from the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies.

[Philippe-Edwin Bélanger, President, Canadian Association for Graduate Studies]

Thank you and good morning.

As you know, my name is Philippe-Edwin Bélanger. I am the director of graduate studies and student success at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique in Quebec City.

[Fahim Quadir, Vice-President, Canadian Association for Graduate Studies]

Good morning.

My name is Fahim Quadir. I'm the vice-provost and the dean of the school of graduate studies and post-doctoral affairs at Queen's University.

[Philippe-Edwin Bélanger]

We are pleased to address the committee today in our capacity as president and vice-president of the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies, CAGS, Canada's national association for the advancement of excellence in graduate education, research and scholarship. CAGS remains firm in its support for increasing the size and number of graduate student and post-doctoral scholarships provided by the three federal granting agencies.

[Fahim Quadir]

We strongly believe that the current models for distributing federal research funding in Canada are outdated and ineffective in achieving their core mission of supporting the next generation of researchers. In particular, the current concentration of Canadian research funding among a few universities has created an inequitable and, at times, inaccessible research funding ecosystem in this country. This is particularly true for rural, small and mid-sized universities. While the current framework rewards institutions with robust faculty-level research agendas, it does not always adequately account for the size and complexity of an institution's graduate student population. Furthermore, the current framework does not acknowledge that distinctive centres of excellence exist in all institutions, both large and small, urban and rural.

[Philippe-Edwin Bélanger]

The current funding model also poses major challenges for small and medium-sized universities that may not have the administrative staff and expertise required to apply for and obtain federal funding under demanding and extremely competitive competitions.

When the time comes for the federal government to plan its research investments, we think it would be a good opportunity to reconsider and redefine the federal funding distribution model to make it more institutionally and regionally balanced, yet still based on academic merit.

[Fahim Quadir]

To effectively support graduate student research, as well as to foster a culture of innovation in Canada, CAGS proposes a model for distributing funds based upon the size of an institution's graduate student population.

This new model would be supported by three fundamental principles and/or assumptions: All universities in Canada, regardless of their size and location, have centres of research excellence and exceptional graduate students; equity in graduate education and scholarship is fundamentally enhanced when graduate students from different types of institutions and disciplines have access to federal funding; and academic excellence and merit of the students should be the primary driver in distributing federal research funding.

[Philippe-Edwin Bélanger]

We're going to make a few proposals.

In our view, the changes we are proposing would improve the graduate studies scholarship distribution process, while ensuring a more equitable distribution of federal funding in support of graduate students across the entire Canadian university ecosystem and in all regions of Canada.

[Fahim Quadir]

We recommend two specific policy changes.

The first is establishing a new framework for research funding and distribution quotas determined by the number of graduate students enrolled in research-based programs at each institution. This would shift the current allocation of funding to a model that is balanced, based upon academic merit of the students and aligned with the proportion of researchers in each of the three tri-agencies. This would also expand access to funding opportunities for all universities regardless of their size, location and profile.

The second is creating a mobility scholarship program, which CAGS is proposing. It should provide funding to graduate students and post-doctoral scholars to pursue part of their research program and their studies outside of their own institution. It should be similar to the European Commission's Erasmus mundus program. CAGS would like the tri-agencies to evaluate the introduction of a Canadian Erasmus program to encourage interprovincial graduate student and post-doctoral student mobility.

[Philippe-Edwin Bélanger]

In closing, the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies and many other stakeholders in higher education in Canada believe that a more equitable model for distributing federal research funding would better serve the interests of our universities, their students, Canada's research community and Canadian society at large.

Thank you for your attention. We look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you for your excellent presentation.

Now we move to Dr. Eric Weissman from the Post-secondary Student Homeless/Housing Research Network.

Dr. Weissman, you have five minutes, please.

[Dr. Eric Weissman, Associate Professor, Department of Social Science, University of New Brunswick, and Member, Post-secondary Student Homeless/Housing Research Network]

Thank you.

Greetings. I want to thank the committee for inviting me as a representative of the Post-secondary Student Homeless/Housing Research Network. I would also like to add in response to my colleagues that I actually was a CAGS recipient of the Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2014, so thank you.

I'm an associate professor at UNB in Saint John. I'm known as a lived experience scholar. I have been in recovery from addictions and episodic homelessness for about 28 years. Most of my work focuses on these areas, and on finding ways to incorporate lived experience in qualitative research, and also seeing students' or other potential researchers' life courses as evidence of skills and qualifications deserving of recognition and funding. I will return to this later.

Since 2016 we have been studying post-secondary student homelessness. The work began as surveys at sites across Canada. In 2021, our network, anchored at UNB in Saint John, expanded to eight sites and was funded by Making the Shift Inc., part of the Networks of Centres of Excellence of Canada. The research asks what students, faculty, administrators and researchers think the role of institutions and government should be in assisting them with housing and other costs.

One might ask how research on student housing bears on innovations in the funding of research in Canada. The housing piece is a key ingredient for student success at all levels of the post-secondary experience. I agree with the comments made by Dr. Vaugeois on March 21 and many others about what I would call implicit biases toward funding previously funded scholars and institutions. They do lead to overt disparities, great frustration and demoralization among researchers, especially in smaller settings. I am going to address how rethinking housing supports will support researchers and, hence, research.

Five per cent of Canada's 2.2 million post-secondary students live in some form of homelessness. That's close to 110,000 students every day. Sixty-four per cent of them allocate more than 30% of their income to housing. Fifty per cent suffer mental health issues, and at some of our smaller sites in our research close to 70% of students would leave school if faced with that hardship and over 30% had done so in the past.

Equity-denied groups were overrepresented in the data. Close to 80% of post-secondary students are youths 17 to 29. The other 20% or so are older, many returning students in graduate programs seeking to reinvent themselves through research practices towards purposeful lives in a changing economy. Many have families and housing pressures and many live in housing precarity through this reinvention.

Regional colleges and polytechnics may be smaller than large urban universities, but they play instrumental roles in maintaining workforces and contributing to practical research. So when we're funding research, or tuition, we are funding student life courses that are more complicated than traditionally thought of, more than the research, more than the ideas. The research is intertwined in these complex life courses. It's time to consider what more the government can do to support this important piece, the housing piece.

Supporting student housing will directly lead to the well-being of students, encourage long-term research tracks, and increase graduate and post-graduate attendance. An overwhelming majority of students and other respondents in our work feel it is incumbent on the federal government to help with this urgent part of their education, and they balk at applying to graduate programs because of this cost factor.

On two of my research projects this year I have had gifted students who found the pressure of maintaining their housing and their schooling too difficult and in the midst of the research had to take leave from their research positions. I believe in anecdotal evidence. My colleagues will tell you how common housing-related precarities are among our research assistants and the effect it has on our research. Be it AI or the cost of living, post-secondary is facing several existential threats. The future of research in Canada is not simply about funding research, but about funding the post-secondary experience better to guarantee basic needs and encourage potential researchers to stay in school. Our respondents agree that tempering the housing piece itself will yield long-term benefits to post-secondary and to Canadian research literacy in the future.

I have more that I would like to address perhaps in the question period. I would like to mention as well, based on my own experience, the support I got from Concordia University as a person with unconventional.... I left school when I was in the middle of a Ph.D. in the late 1980s and had a massive gap in my experience. I finally got into a program where they valued lived experience at Concordia and the results—CAGS is witness to this—were a really interesting form of research.

One of the things our respondents and our entire network believes in is that the government must get involved in figuring out ways to fund and to value non-academic and lived experiences similarly to the ways we value track records.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you.

I know more could be said, but time is not on our side on that. Hopefully, during questions we can explore some of those ideas.

Now we will move over to Dr. Whitaker, from the Canadian Association of University Teachers, online, for five minutes, please.

[Dr. Robin Whitaker, Vice-President, Canadian Association of University Teachers]

Good afternoon. I join you from St. John's, Newfoundland, the ancestral homelands of the Beothuk and Mi'kmaq peoples. Thank you for undertaking this important study.

I'm vice-president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which represents 72,000 researchers, teachers, librarians and general staff at universities, colleges and polytechnics across the country. I'm also a professor at Memorial University, a comprehensive research university.

Federal support for research is critically important to current and future challenges. Over time we've seen changes to what the federal government funds, who it funds and on what basis. What that history tells us about how to distribute federal research funds to ensure the greatest benefits for Canadians can be summarized as follows: First, we need to ensure adequate support for basic research; second, programs must be inclusive of all disciplines and researchers; and third, the integrity and independence of research and funding decisions must be respected.

Fundamental science—or basic research—is the foundation of knowledge and innovation. It may not have specific applications built into its design, but history shows that most important discoveries are grounded in basic research driven by a quest for knowledge. Fundamental research has led to such unanticipated innovations as X-rays, nylon, Teflon, GPS technology, informatics, superconductivity, medical imaging and the mRNA vaccines. In short, applied and mission-driven research cannot thrive if fundamental research is struggling.

The advisory panel on federal support for fundamental science suggested, at minimum, a three-to-one distribution of investments in research between basic and applied. Some experts suggest the ratio should be closer to four to one if we're to reap the best rewards for society. As the most recent advisory panel on the federal research support system stated:

Fundamental, investigator-initiated research is the cornerstone of the research endeavour and must be supported at internationally competitive levels.

The panel called for, as a first step, an increase of at least 10% annually for five years to the councils' total base budgets for their core grant programming. This increase would benefit researchers across Canada at all kinds of institutions. If we look at the new frontiers fund for interdisciplinary research, the success rate—the number of applications to awards—is only 23%, for CIHR it's 18%, and for NSERC and SSHRC it's 58% and 54% respectively. Notably, applications are down at SSHRC by 33% in the last decade, contributing to a somewhat misleading 29% rise in success.

We know, from members, that many grant applications are approved on merit but go unfunded due to insufficient funds. Unfunded research means good ideas are left unexplored, ideas that would contribute to our collective knowledge and know-how. This unfunded research also means lost support and training for graduate students. Increases to scholarships, fellowships and research grants, which support two out of three grad students, will particularly benefit small and medium institutions with fewer resources to fund talent.

In addition to inadequate funding levels, system fairness would be enhanced by a better balanced allocation of funds across the tri-council. The majority of Canadian researchers work in the social sciences and humanities, yet SSHRC receives only about one-fifth of federal research funding. Fairness would be enhanced too by renewing funds for the dimensions program, launched by the tri-council in 2018 and overseen by NSERC. This program supported participating institutions in breaking down barriers. Its end in 2023 disproportionately impacted smaller institutions, which have fewer resources to advance equity, diversity and inclusion. Addressing administrative barriers, such as the common CV, will further assist in the fair distribution of funds, benefitting small and medium institutions with less internal support for researchers. CAUT also supports recommendations made by this committee's report, "Revitalizing Research and Scientific Publication in French in Canada", to improve access to resources that help make research and scientific knowledge in French more accessible.

Protecting the integrity of federally supported science and research is critical to our success. Federal government budgets have, at times, announced targeted research funding that bypassed the peer-review process. Rather than allowing the scientific community to determine what research merits funding, targeted initiatives required the granting agencies to direct funds toward industrial collaborations, specific disciplines or topics. However, as John Polanyi, Canada's most prominent Nobel laureate, warned, when governments or industry try to direct scientific inquiry, bypassing the rigorous peer-review system through which the scientific community protects its integrity, our scientific horizons shrink and our future is diminished. Attempts to forecast what research will be relevant have a dismal history and only lead to the inequitable channelling of funding into politically or commercially desired forms of applied research.

Certainly, applied research is important, but projects should be assessed on their merits, alongside basic or theoretical research through the established processes of peer review.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

You're right on time. Thanks, Dr. Whitaker, for your presentation.

I wanted to clear up a potential conflict of interest because next month I'll be starting a graduate program myself, doing a master's in leadership at the University of Guelph. As a senior citizen in Ontario, I don't pay for tuition, I don't receive funds from the university in any way, but I just wanted to let the committee know that this is going on.

Mr. Lobb, you have the floor for the first six-minute round, please.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Congratulations on your studies. That's great to see. Maybe the Prime Minister could use some of your wisdom when you've finished your studies.

The first question is for Mr. Quadir and Mr. Bélanger. You said the system is outdated. Would you like to elaborate more on that?

[Fahim Quadir]

I would be happy to do so.

I think the current system is structured around two assumptions. They're not directly related to students' funding support; they're related to the support faculty members would normally receive from tri-agencies. Based on the success rate of the faculty members, each university would receive quotas for doctoral students and master's students.

Then, I think it would be looked at from the student success perspective. For doctoral and master's students, the numbers would be determined by the success rates of their particular institutions. This allows particular institutions and a select group of students to access resources available to our graduate student community. In doing so, we often ignore the fact that good, solid graduate students are present in many different parts of the country. Because of the very fact that faculty success rates are not always the same at every single institution, their quotas are not likely to be exactly the same as in some cases.

This system really encourages particular locations and particular institutions to benefit more than all graduate students with academic excellence.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Maybe I look at this from an overly simplistic point of view, but a lot of students who graduate from my area go to the University of Guelph, and of course it's not a U15 school. I'm not putting words into people's mouths who have appeared here before, but they kind of alluded to the fact that well, you know, schools like the University of Toronto, which is a fine university, have such a great infrastructure that they should get more because they can handle the grants and the funding. However, I can't believe that to be true because if you met with the University of Guelph and said, “Hey, over the next 20 years, this is the funding you're going to receive. I want to see how you can demonstrate the ramp-up,” I think they would do it easily.

If I look at the economy in Ontario, especially in southern Ontario, it's very dominated by agriculture. It would only enhance the agricultural success with new varieties, pest-resistant crops and everything else. I'd probably see a great advancement for humanity.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

[Fahim Quadir]

I can say two things.

You can look at it from a graduate student's perspective; there are numerous reasons why a graduate student would not really want to move from the place where they're currently situated, due to their caregiving responsibilities, family responsibilities and other financial responsibilities. Even if they have the excellence, they may not necessarily be able to move to another institution and be part of a vibrant culture of research.

How do you recognize those talents and continue to support their success stories? I think the current system, unfortunately, is not doing it. I think we have myths about locations and places. The system we are proposing would really allow us to make the whole system much more accessible for graduate students, regardless of their location, regardless of their affiliation with a particular institution.

We need to foster a culture of excellence.

[Philippe-Edwin Bélanger]

Yes, I agree. We underscored in our presentation that smaller universities are indeed experiencing specific difficulties, primarily because of their administrative capacity to respond to calls for projects and major competitions. The smaller universities do not have specialized personnel for every competition, in all programs or in all fields.

Indeed, when a major initiative is put in place, whether it be the Canada Foundation for Innovation or federal research councils, the smaller universities, which often have to conform to the same deadlines and the same rules, have a harder time meeting the challenge because they don't have the same organizational capacity.

In future, I think it would be a good idea if research funding took account of the specific situation facing smaller institutions, precisely so they can respond to competitions and calls for projects.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

One other question is about these endowments that these major, mega-large universities have. The University of Toronto has over $3 billion. McGill and Western have almost $2 billion. That's a lot of money. Western is just down the road from where I grew up, but I'm not picking on them. It's just a fact.

The reality is that they have some of the biggest endowments, but they also receive some of the biggest dollars for research, so it's a multiplying effect for what they're doing. The smaller, more regional universities are left behind in endowments in some cases, and also in the research funding.

Do you have any thoughts on that? Should the universities be called on to use more of their endowments for this?

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

We're over time, but if you have a yes or no, or if you'd like to answer—

[Philippe-Edwin Bélanger]

It's not a yes or no.

I would just say that—

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

We're over time. If there is an answer, we'll have to bring it in writing or maybe in a future round.

Mr. Turnbull, go ahead for six minutes, please.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Thanks, Chair.

Thanks to all the witnesses for being here today.

Maybe I'll start by going back to your opening remarks, Mr. Quadir and Mr. Bélanger, which were quite good.

Maybe I misheard or I didn't understand completely, or perhaps you ran through it a bit too quickly for my attention this morning. Maybe I was too focused on the federal budget in anticipation of this afternoon.

Can you slow down and describe to me what you are specifically proposing?

I understood there were two policy changes. You're saying there's a need for a new framework, but I want to make sure I fully understand what you meant by that. I wasn't sure whether I completely captured it in my mind.

Could you maybe revisit that?