Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning.
The Conseil national des cycles supérieurs (Quebec Council for Graduate Studies) represents some 30,000 graduate students in Quebec, and it is on behalf of the council that I am presenting some of the proposals included in our brief.
The brief that we submitted in August deals mainly with the need to support university research and thus help in the training of future researchers so that Canada can remain competitive within a knowledge-based economy that is ever more globalized and, especially, given the rather uncertain economic recovery.
We have articulated three key proposals. First, with regard to the training of future researchers, the three federal funding councils have expressed significant needs in recent years. There are thousands of students whose applications are turned down despite their academic merits, for lack of funding.
Therefore, we believe that the federal government must cover part of those agencies' needs by maintaining the 900 additional scholarships that were created as part of the federal government stimulus plan, and by providing the councils, i.e., the SSHRC, CIHR and NSERC, with the funds needed to meet their expressed needs.
Our second point deals with the issue of research infrastructure. Since 2001, the federal government has supported universities by offsetting their indirect research costs.
To support research funded by the government, universities incur indirect research costs, including the cost of maintenance, equipment and additional space.
The federal grant only covers 20% of those indirect research costs, whereas estimates show that Quebec covers about 65%.
We believe that the federal government should set as its target the funding of at least 40% of indirect research costs.
Furthermore, a noteworthy element of the economic recovery plan is the knowledge infrastructure program, which has injected $2 billion into Canadian universities and colleges. Among other things, that program has helped alleviate part of the significant problem of accumulated deferred maintenance within our institutions—a problem that amounted to nearly $10 billion in 2008 for all of Canada.
The program helped reduce the scope of the problem by 20%. Moreover, universities, provinces and, in some cases, municipalities provided matching funds and thus helped us make good progress.
We think that the recovery is uncertain and that some stimulus measures must be maintained. As well, accumulated deferred maintenance in our universities remains a problem that we have to address. In our opinion, the knowledge infrastructure program should be extended for a number of years.
The last issue we would like to address concerns post-doctoral fellows. In our introduction, we highlighted the importance of remaining competitive within a knowledge-based economy. In that regard, post-doctoral fellows represent Canada's research elite. Their skills are highly coveted around the world. In fact, 65% of post-doctoral fellows in Canada come from abroad.
The decision by the federal government to tax post-doctoral fellowships is contrary to what we are advocating and places Canada in a much less competitive situation. We therefore recommend that the federal government maintain the tax exemption on post-doctoral fellowships.
Because of their university training activities, we consider that post-doctoral fellows are students. Furthermore, the CNCS represents over two thirds of Quebec post-doctoral fellows.
We also want to point out the fact that, once their taxes have been paid, post-doctoral fellows receive less than a doctoral student with a $30,000 scholarship, for example, which is tax free. That leads to an imbalance in the salary scale of master's, doctoral and post-doctoral students, and eventually of full professors.