Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee. We welcome the opportunity to appear before you.
I'm here representing the Canadian Association of University Teachers. We're a federation of faculty associations at 124 universities and colleges across the country, representing about 68,000 academic staff.
It's a challenge for a witness to appear before you with five minutes to address a bill of such enormity. One hardly knows where to begin. The table of contents, simply listing the acts affected, is 15 pages long. It makes such fundamental changes, or allows fundamental changes, to EI, to old age security, appeals from old age security and Canada Pension Plan, eliminating the office of the Inspector General for CSIS, and even repealing the fair wages and hours of labour policy that was introduced by the Mulroney government to ensure that contractors for the federal government were fairly paid.
In our view, combining all these things together raises a fundamental issue of process and transparency, and ultimately democracy.
I'll choose to make our comments on provisions that have some serious effect for our members. One is provisions in the bill that continue to erode Canada's scientific and cultural knowledge base. Secondly, the bill represents a major step backwards in the promotion of greater equity within our universities and colleges, and finally, it has serious implications for our contract academic staff, which constitutes about 40% of the people who teach in colleges and universities, as well as other people who have seasonal jobs.
First, with regard to the erosion of our knowledge base, the last federal budget announced cuts across all government departments, including support for the three federal research funding agencies, SSHRC, NSIRC, and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, at a time when more research is more important than ever.
At the time, we were told no programs would be affected. The savings would come from administrative efficiencies and synergies. We're seeing the opposite. Because of time, I'll only give you one example. At NSIRC, for instance, we've seen the elimination of the major resource support and the research tools and instrument program that provided critical infrastructure to support basic discovery-driven research.
I have a letter that I'll leave with the committee signed by 49 of the top scientists in Canada, deploring what the elimination of those programs will mean and pointing out that now there are no funding streams left dedicated to the purchase of scientific equipment or to operate nationally or internationally unique resources.
Beyond that, the bill also makes serious cuts to Library and Archives Canada. As all of you know, our national library and public archives are basically the memory institution for Canada, preserving our heritage so that future generations can know our history and compiling all the books and articles about our country. Already devastated by decisions made by the archivist and librarian of Canada to put a moratorium on purchase of acquisitions, to make other cuts, the current budget makes further reductions in the funding for that vital agency.
The cuts to Statistics Canada are also devastating. It's having to eliminate, for example—and this is only one example—the only survey of full-time university faculty across the country. We'll be the only industrialized country in the world that will have no idea how many faculty we have, how one does planning. When the OAC does its tables of international comparisons, there will simply be a whole line of blank cells beside Canada because we don't collect the data.
In terms of moving backward on equity, instead of strengthening the federal contractors program, which was established by a Conservative government in 1986 to help achieve workplace equity, the budget bill before you effectively guts that program.
In terms of penalizing contract academic staff, as I say, roughly 40% of the people who teach in Canadian universities currently are on a per-course or limited-term appointment, so that during summers there aren't jobs and they use employment insurance as a way of tiding them over. The effect of the changes are going to be devastating for them.