Thank you, Mr. Colleret.
I'll start with an issue that concerns every scientific community in Canada. For the past two decades, the value of graduate scholarships in Canada has essentially stayed the same, despite a 30% increase in the consumer price index. What that means on a practical level is that we are forcing our best and brightest, the researchers of tomorrow, to live below the poverty line. That is why we are asking the government for a 50% increase in the annual value of Canada's graduate scholarships and an annual adjustment based on inflation.
Barely 3% of graduate students receive scholarships and fellowships from one of the granting councils. This financial support is, however, known to play an instrumental role in the paths students follow and the success they achieve, not to mention that the brain drain is a real risk. We are already seeing it. We believe the number of graduate student scholarships available through the three councils should be doubled.
Nevertheless, it's important to point out that the current quota system is negatively impacting equitable access to scholarships and regions' ability to build scientific capacity. Currently, the number of scholarships each university gets is based on the value of the research grant funding it receives. This fosters a system of accumulating benefit. A total of 73% of graduate student scholarships go to just 15% of Canadian universities, which tend to be those in very large urban centres. To prevent the concentration of scholarships in the hands of a few universities, the quota system should ensure that every institution, regardless of where in the country it is, receives a minimum number of scholarships in the three research areas.
Furthermore, it's clear that the increasingly large share of research funding set aside for medicine and large-scale competitions, such as the Canada first research excellence fund, tends to favour large universities with medical schools.
However, leveraging the expertise of the entire scientific community is imperative. Why? I'll give you an example. The researchers in our cross-sectoral health research group report that it is impossible to reduce inequities in health care access without tailoring prevention initiatives and the delivery of health care and social services to people's lived realities and living environments. As someone mentioned earlier, it's important to think about rural and remote areas. That means researchers shouldn't all be living and working in large urban centres. Research can't be carried out exclusively in large teaching hospitals. It also has to be carried out in the hundreds of other places where people access care and services on a daily basis.
To harness and build the research capacity that exists in every part of the country and better meet the needs of Canada's population, we have three recommendations.
First, we recommend that the granting councils' total base budgets be increased by at least 10% annually for five years. As the Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System highlighted in its report—commonly known as the Bouchard report—research funding over the past 20 years simply hasn't kept pace with the pressures on the research system.
Second, we recommend that this investment go hand in hand with measures to ensure greater funding equity across different disciplines. At the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, or CIHR, which funds health research, some 60% of funding is allocated to biomedical and clinical research. As a result, a significant proportion of non-medical health expertise is overlooked. This also contributes to the concentration of funding. Some 91% of the funding that flows from CIHR goes to just 15 universities in Canada.
Lastly, we recommend that federal departments be given the budgets they need to support research that addresses the country's priorities, in co‑operation with universities.
To conclude, I will say a few words about the place of French in science. As you of course know, English dominates the science realm. Canada must take a stand to ensure the vitality of the French-speaking research community, which is over 35,000 strong across the country. We provided a few examples in our submission.