As the Canadian Federation of Students, we represent about 70,000 graduate students in the country, including exchange students. On the issue of the Canada research chairs, we think it's obviously excellent to develop these chair positions, because you don't just get the chair; you also get the infrastructure that goes with it. Usually an office goes with it, and it provides a centre for research in a particular area. I just want to highlight an issue that we're concerned about in Canada's colleges and universities, and that's the incredibly increasing reliance on contract faculty.
What we have on the one hand is the situation of the Canada research chairs, who are super-elite all-star researchers. What we have on the other hand are institutions at which students by and large go through an undergraduate degree without ever developing a relationship with a full-time tenured professor. This reliance on contract faculty is a huge problem on a lot of campuses, whether the students are current doctoral students or recent graduates. Doctoral students and former doctoral students teaching at McMaster are traveling to Wilfrid Laurier and to Guelph, cobbling together a career by teaching classes on all these different campuses and not doing any research. They live in their cars, and their cars are pretty much their offices. It doesn't create the kind of quality we need across the board.
While we like things like the Canada research chairs, which create excellence, we also need to elevate the faculty-to-student ratios, and we need to make sure that there's more tenure-track faculty on campuses across the country.