Good afternoon. I will be making my presentation in French.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, we would like to begin by thanking you for inviting us to appear today to present our brief. The Conseil national des cycles supérieurs, or CNCS, is an organization whose mandate is to defend and promote the rights and interests of graduate level students attending Quebec educational institutions. We make representations on their behalf to the public and to the main players within the educational system and the research environment, primarily university research. The CNCS has some 30,000 members in Quebec.
We are here today to present our recommendations with respect with the Government of Canada's 2007-2008 budget. They will focus on three items: first, increasing federal transfers for post-secondary education; second, increasing funding for university research; and finally, enhancing university research by promoting the professional integration of master's and Ph.D. level graduates.
I will move quickly to our first recommendation, which is to increase federal transfers for post-secondary education. In order for Canada to be among the top five countries in terms of its investments in research and development, we believe more money must be invested in our universities. In that regard, it is our opinion that the appropriate lever is an increase of $4.9 billion in federal transfers for post-secondary education, beginning with the next budget. This step is needed in order to provide core funding to the universities and thereby allow them to properly carry out their mission.
Our second recommendation is to increase funding for university research. The CNCS believes that in order to ensure the renewal of the professorial corps in our universities, increase the number and quality of research projects that are carried out, and meet Canada's growing need for a highly skilled work force, the Government of Canada should, as a first step, increase the budgets of its funding councils -- namely the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Health Research Institutes -- and, as a second step, strengthen the environment in which research is conducted in academic institutions by covering the indirect costs of research based on its actual value, and implementing a specific funding program for smaller universities.
I would like to elaborate somewhat on the second point, which is the need to increase the budgets of the granting councils. The goal here is to allow students and professors carrying out research to do so in a competitive research environment. In that regard, we are asking the government to provide the three granting councils with the funding they believe is necessary to meet the objectives set out in their strategic plan. For the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, that amount would be $75 million this year. For the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, we're talking about $10 million, and for the Health Research Institutes, some $110 million.
In terms of strengthening the research environment in our academic institutions, since we do recognize the fundamental role of knowledge creation, we should be funding the indirect costs of research. At the present time, only 27 per cent of those costs are being supported, when in fact we should be covering 65 per cent of the direct costs of research. As regards a specific funding program to support research in smaller universities, the idea here is to compensate for current inequities between the funding provided to large universities and that provided to smaller universities for the purposes of research. We know that small universities have a very significant impact regionally. In order to compensate for those inequities, we are proposing, as has been suggested by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, that a specific program be implemented at a cost of about $30 million.
Our third recommendation is to enhance university research by promoting the professional integration of Master's and Ph.D. level graduates. A number of recent studies show that Master's and Ph.D. level graduates have trouble making the transition from school to the workplace in their specific discipline, even though these are precisely the people that are largely responsible for transferring the expertise developed in universities to their communities. In order to foster the professional integration of Master's and Ph.D. level graduates, we are proposing that two programs, which so far have been successful initiatives, be appropriately funded. They are the Community-University Research Alliances, administered by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the National Research Council of Canada's Industrial Research Assistance Program.
That completes our recommendations with respect to the budget. I will briefly go over them again: a $4.9 billion increase in transfers for post-secondary education; increased investments in the three research funding councils; funding of the indirect costs of research based on their actual value; implementation of a specific research funding program for smaller universities; and enhancement of the professional integration of Master's and Ph.D. level graduates so that university expertise is effectively transferred to business and the community.
Thank you.