I should start by saying that the three granting councils and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation do a wonderful job when it comes to the vast majority of the grants they provide and the programming they offer to support investigator-initiated research. However, a look at the data from 2000 to 2021 shows that an increasing share of the research funding we receive comes from the Quebec government. It's about 26%, which I would say is proportional in terms of the number of researchers at our institutions versus the total number of researchers in the province. Conversely, the proportion of research funding Université du Québec receives from the federal government has shrunk to 11% of UQ's total research funding.
One reason is the significant amount of funding allocated to medical disciplines—and no doubt the pandemic amplified that trend—and the increasing share of federal funding going towards large-scale competitions like the Canada first research excellence fund. That tends to favour very large universities, which have sizable teams and the capacity to carry out these types of major projects.
Earlier, I gave the example of CIHR, which funds health research but focuses heavily on biomedical and clinical research. What that means is the bulk of grants go to universities with medical schools. The institutions in our network are very active in the health sector. I mentioned our cross-sectoral health research group, which has more than 200 scientists and nearly 900 students who focus on studying living standards, detection and vulnerability. They are very active in Quebec's regions. They have trouble securing funding, because the model is still very much geared towards medical research.
As you can see, the concentration of research grants is due to a few factors. I also talked about quotas earlier. What we're observing is that the more grants a university receives, the better its chances of being successful in all kinds of competitions or receiving grants. The way the system works, more and more funding gets allocated to a few universities.