Thank you very much for having invited me today.
I will speak in English.
The Canadian Association for Graduate Studies represents about 165,000 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in Canada. I'm not going to make the argument today that we need highly qualified personnel. I'm not going to make the argument that Canadian universities aren't doing a good job--we're doing a great job.
However, I will let the science and technology board make the case for me that in order to have “the best-educated, most-skilled, and most flexible workforce in the world”, we are going to need to work cooperatively--the federal government, the provincial governments, and all of the universities--to make this happen. Unfortunately, as the Conference Board notes, we are “strikingly low” in Ph.D.s in math, science, computer science, and all applied sciences, those very sciences that we think are going to bring innovation to our economy.
This doesn't include the humanities and the social sciences, which we are going to be relying on more and more in the next few years as we come out of this recession: social policy, planning, and public works. We need these people.
Unfortunately, we haven't quite closed the gap. We need to work harder on this and we need to work together. There is a lot more work to be done. We're just not there yet.
Our recommendations for how we might get there are based largely on policy and agenda items. The first recommendation is to continue the work that has been done in the last budget in increasing the scholarships for master's students and graduate students.
The last budget also introduced infrastructure money. It's welcome. We clearly needed infrastructure money in the university system. However, education is not only buildings. We need to have the buildings and we need to have the labs, but we need to have the people who are in the labs. Labs need people, students need supervisors, and labs need graduate students to work in them.
The second point in terms of investing is that we need slightly longer long-term planning. A one- to two-year investment in new scholarships is actually not quite adequate to allow the system to turn. A university is like a large ship; it does take a bit to get this thing to turn.
Professors are not that willing to expand their labs for a one-year input of new scholarships. Three- to five-year planning cycles allow people to move their research a little bit so that they can get new agendas to shift, but a one-year shot is really not enough to get a professor off their current path. I'm not saying that in a negative way, of course. What we're really suggesting here in terms of cost would be to simply continue the new master's and Ph.D. scholarships for an additional two to four years so that there would be a longer-term commitment and university professors could actually change their research directions.
Secondly, we urge the finance committee and the federal government to be aware of the need for balance in research. We need to have basic research. There's a lot of emphasis and a clear winning when we can get close to the front. We have things coming out of universities so that companies, such as the one that was mentioned for the cattle, can actually get these things in the field and get them into the economy. That will not happen if we don't actually maintain our money with the basic research. What are we going to do in five years if we've used up all the research? We have to keep that pipeline open. Who does all the work? Graduate students do all of the work. That's my plea here. Eighty per cent of all the money goes straight to graduate students.
The third recommendation is to invest in post-doctoral fellows. The tri-councils currently fund only 500 post-doctoral fellows. Ph.D.s in the sciences and the medicines need another two to four years to become specialists in their areas. We pay a lot of money to get people through a Ph.D. Let's not waste it by having them go somewhere else. Let's not waste it by not having positions to keep them in Canada for when the economy turns around. It takes eight years to get a Ph.D. If the government said tomorrow that we need 10,000 Ph.D.s and we had stopped production, it would take eight years to get there.
These suggestions are not big fund requests. These are largely requests for change in policy and setting of an agenda in the long term. For me--I'm a computer scientist--three to five years is still the long term. Let's have a planning horizon that will put the economy and society in good stead.
Thank you very much.