Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would like to welcome the members of the finance committee to St. John's on the island portion of Newfoundland and Labrador, which I acknowledge as the unceded homeland of the Beothuk and Mi'kmaq peoples.
Welcome to Newfoundland and Labrador.
I am vice-president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, CAUT, which represents over 72,000 teachers, researchers, librarians and general staff at universities, colleges and polytechnics across the country. I'm also a professor here at Memorial University in the department of anthropology.
I want to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak about CAUT's submission to the pre-budget consultations.
Canada is facing significant challenges—economic, social and environmental. To meet these challenges, we need to strengthen our public post-secondary education system, which is the foundation of our knowledge economy. It is also the foundation of our strong democracy and our robust society.
Today, I will highlight two areas that require immediate attention—science and research, and public funding for post-secondary education—and I will offer six recommendations.
The first area is science and research. While countries like the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States and the Netherlands are all increasing their investments in research, in innovation and in fostering talent, Canada has fallen behind its peers. From the discovery of X-rays and nylon to superconductivity, medical imaging, computers and mRNA vaccines, major scientific progress is driven by basic research, i.e., research without specific commercial outcomes or applications in mind at the outset. The Canadian government needs to boost its support for fundamental research to encourage real scientific progress that will produce long-term benefits. The report of the government's advisory panel on the federal research support system, often referred to as the Bouchard report, rightly notes, “Societies that invest in their research enterprise thrive while those that do not falter.”
These are our two recommendations on science and research: one, an increase of at least 10% annually for five years to the federal research councils’ total base budget for core grant programming, and two, an increase in both the number and value of graduate student scholarships and post-doctoral fellowships by $200 million over two years. The value of graduate scholarship awards in Canada has remained unchanged for nearly 20 years, and post-doctoral fellowships have seen only a small increase over the same period. That means that the value of these scholarships and fellowships has declined quite substantially.
The second main area relates to partnering with the provinces to improve the affordability, access and quality of education. In February of this year, MUNFA, the Memorial University of Newfoundland Faculty Association, my own union, was on strike for two weeks over issues related to precarity, equity and affordability, joining colleagues in almost every province who are concerned about the future of public post-secondary education in Canada.
In this area, we have four recommendations. The first is to permanently double the value of the Canada student grant, bringing it to $6,000, and to establish a more equitable fifty-fifty funding model for grants and loans, moving away from the current 2:1 model of repayable loans versus grants.
With regard to our second recommendation, increasing student financial assistance on its own will not address affordability. Tuition alone increased by 3% last year for domestic students. The federal government needs to work with the provinces to restore public funding, which is now below 50% of revenue for Canadian universities, resulting in the exploitation of international students, the loss of research talent, and more. Here it's worth remembering that funding for education is both a powerful economic multiplier and a critical equalizer.
The third recommendation is to improve data on post-secondary education in Canada. There is currently no data available on national tuition for college education, international student fees, student housing, education and workforce equality, the size of our scientific community, and other key issues.
Finally, we need to protect the mission of public post-secondary education by amending the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, CCAA, and the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act to exclude public post-secondary education institutions. The unprecedented use of federal insolvency legislation at Laurentian University in 2021, as we all know, was inappropriate and set a dangerous precedent.
I hope to elaborate on these points further during the question and answer period.
Thank you very much.