Bill C-2 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) Committee on May 29th, 2006

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

In your fifth point you propose that students be given explicit access to the tribunal for protection. If that were the case, and I think that's a very interesting idea. If there was a--

[An hon. member]

[Editor's Note: Inaudible]

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

This is the document that the student body distributed.

[An hon. member]

Is it translated?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

I don't know. This is a summary of recommendations I have here.

I hope this isn't running against my time, because I'm being interrupted here.

I just have this document here.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

The clock is stopped.

There has been no document distributed. He may be referring to something; I don't know what he's referring to, but there is no document before the committee.

[Benoît Sauvageau, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Thank you for telling us that there is no documentation. I thought that Mr. Poilievre was referring to one of the students' documents. I must have made a mistake.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

He doesn't have anything in his hands.

Look: you have a document that we do not have.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Okay, enough. Wait a minute.

Mr. Poilievre.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Okay. I don't have a document in my hand, apparently.

You did suggest that you would like access to a tribunal. If the act were amended to remove the existence of the tribunal and replace it with a body called the staff relations board, how many of your students are staff of the federal government and would have access to that board?

[Angela Regnier]

Very few, if any.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

In other words, the staff relations board would have no jurisdiction to give any of your students any protection whatsoever.

[Angela Regnier]

That is correct.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

That's my only question.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Petit.

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Good afternoon, Ms. Regnier. Thank you for joining us.

I understood that you were pleased that the millennium scholarships were going to be monitored. Is that correct? Could you tell me why that attracted your attention and how that is reflected in your comments with respect to Bill C-2?

[Angela Regnier]

I'm going to pass this over to Ian.

[Ian Boyko]

From what I understand from my reading of the legislation, government foundations such as the Millennium Scholarship Foundation would then become subject to freedom of information searches. We would find this to be an important tool for us, basically because we've had very deep concerns with the operation of the foundation since its inception at the turn of the century in 1999; just by its very nature, it operates outside the purview of Parliament, which is problematic given that it was given $2.5 billion of taxpayers' money to administer grants. It's failed to do that.

Our concern with respect to this legislation comes from the fact we've had serious questions about the way in which the foundation administers its research contracts. It has a $10 million-plus research budget now. Former employees have been given research grants with no discernible bidding process that we can tell. So if we could get access to the internal operations of this foundation, then I think it would be of great public service.

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Ms. Regnier or Mr. Boyko, earlier you referred to monitoring researchers subsidized by all kinds of federal money. Given that education is primarily under provincial jurisdiction, I was wondering how you would have the federal government monitor this issue, since it is a matter of provincial jurisdiction. Have you given any consideration to this aspect of the question?

[Ian Boyko]

I generally agree with your premise, but the federal government plays a vastly more important role in financing university research than do provincial governments. So this is in many ways a federal domain, very clearly, in terms of the three granting councils and other foundations.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Rob Moore.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Thank you for being here today.

I certainly appreciate that you came with a concrete suggestion about an office of research integrity.

You mentioned the millennium scholarship fund. I was wondering if there are specific examples that come to mind of problems that individual students have had, because as a member of Parliament I have heard some complaints, but as a student body, you would have heard a lot more than I have. So can you give just one or two or three specifics of the kinds of problems people ran into with the millennium scholarship fund?

[Ian Boyko]

I think it's an indisputable fact that the foundation has failed abysmally at offering needs-based grants to students, primarily as a result of its basic structure as a foundation, in a gimmicky way. We have a Canada student loans program that's been in place for 40 years. I don't know why the federal government wouldn't want to work through the Canada student loans program.

So it's failed at providing grants, but our specific issue with the foundation under Bill C-2 is its transparency. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of students have received grants from the Millennium Scholarship Foundation, but are now receiving less money from the provincial government as a result. So the individual problems with the grants are distinct from the transparency issues we wanted to raise under Bill C-2.

I hope that helps.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

The other quick question I have is about your mentioning researchers and pressures that can be brought to bear on people who are conducting research through funding from the federal government, directly or indirectly. Could you give examples of what types of pressures could be brought to bear on an individual researcher, so they would feel their work was being compromised and the integrity of their research was being undermined?

[Angela Regnier]

Sure. We are primarily concerned with private pressures on university research and are increasingly finding cases where there has been interference by a private sponsor on either the accurate representation of results, as in the case with this Wiarton experiment, where it seems quite apparent that the results were suppressed in the interest of promoting this new potential disinfectant for drinking water....

We're also concerned with the fact that there are a number of research contracts being signed with secrecy clauses, which was the case with Nancy Olivieri's scandal. She was put in a position where she felt that the lives of her research subjects were potentially endangered and that she was not in a legal position to expose those results. Now, she was brave and decided it was important enough to move forward with them.

I think for students in particular it's increasingly a problem, because they are not the ones who are in a position, often, to be signing the research contracts with private sponsors; they're subject to the influence of their supervisors.

In fact, The Chronicle of Higher Education, a publication that does a lot of writing on issues around research in education, predominantly in North America, has actually published a number of survey results recently on the increasing incidence of misconduct in university research. In the United States, they are reporting that one in three researchers has admitted to research misconduct or some kind of wrongdoing.