In 2002, the federal government endowed the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation with the advanced research in the humanities and human science fund of $125 million. The foundation is living off the interest, so we cannot spend that $125 million. We invest it, and we use it to fund Ph.D. students from Canada and across the world who do innovative research around four themes: human rights and dignity, responsible citizenship, Canada and the world, and people and their natural environment.
The foundation is committed to leadership. How do we appoint mentors and fellows? Mentors come from different sectors. They are former Supreme Court justices, people in the business sector, movies, artists and so on.
They were were the cream of the crop from across the country.
The fellows are university professors who are also experts around these themes that should interest all Canadians. The role of the foundation is to bring impact and leadership training for these Ph.D. students.
I was a scholar for the first three years of the foundation. It had a tremendous effect on my life, my vision of research and the necessity to democratize knowledge, disseminate knowledge and make it accessible to Canadians across the country and around the world.
The foundation has been around a long time. In fact, it marked its 20‑year anniversary. In recent years, we were working to extend our reach internationally. For instance, I developed partnerships with France. Representatives of the foundation were in Spain, back in January.
The Ph.D. students are absolutely brilliant, obviously. We choose 12 or 13 people out of 500 applicants, which is a lot. The selection process is very demanding, and the bar is quite high. We want to make sure that their work has a real impact on the world. That means democratizing knowledge and making it more accessible.
In academia, which is the world I'm from, a world I love, students are highly specialized. When you're working on your Ph.D., you're dealing with a subquestion of a subquestion of a subdiscipline. What the foundation does is help the person to broaden their focus from a single tree to the forest.
How can you make your research accessible and go to the public sector, governments, NGOs and outside the university world to address the most complex issues that should interest all Canadians?
It is the extraordinary generosity of mentors and fellows that made that possible. Under our public interaction program, cohorts of scholars and mentors would go out in the field, whether it be cities in Canada or certain other countries, to explore high-level scientific issues and make that expertise accessible. We would equip them with the tools they needed to democratize their knowledge. It's a colossal undertaking, and we were able to offer them an extraordinary amount of support.
I can speak to my first three years at the foundation, which were incredible, and the last five years, which were equally incredible. In November, we celebrated the foundation's 20th anniversary, and more than 200 people attended. There were about 450 alumni as well as people with very impressive careers who had worked with the scholars.
I, myself, did a Ph.D. That can be a very solitary path. It's just you staring at a blank sheet, writing your thesis on your own with a small committee of supervisors to turn to. Then, all of a sudden, you have the support of the foundation, and it's like this caring family putting its loving arms around you.