Thank you, Chair.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers welcomes this opportunity to present its views to the committee. We represent more than 57,000 academic staff, at more than a hundred universities and colleges in all provinces of the country.
I'm sure you'll all agree that teaching, research, and the community service work that our members perform is critical to the social, cultural, and economic development of Canada. There's virtually no politician in the country—and in this room, I assume—whatever matter their political stripe, who hasn't talked about the importance of post-secondary education for the future of the country. Yet governments all too often ignore the serious challenges faced by post-secondary education.
I want to address three challenges in my presentation today. The first is the crisis in human resources. As you know, many of our members who were hired during the great expansion of the 1960s and 1970s are retiring. Close to 45% of all full-time university teachers are 50 years of age or over. As academic staff retire, they are increasingly being replaced by part-time and contract faculty. At some universities, close to half of the undergraduate courses are taught by non-tenure-track contract faculty. These positions are poorly paid, have few or no benefits, no job security, no academic freedom, and don't even have access to proper offices or support for doing research and scholarship. This has serious implications, not only for the contract academic staff themselves, but also for their students, their full-time colleagues, their institutions, and their communities.
The human resources crisis is intimately linked to the second challenge that I would like to discuss, the ongoing federal underfunding of post-secondary education. Even with the recent increase in the Canada social transfer, federal cash transfers for post-secondary education are still more than $1.2 billion short of what would be needed just to restore funding to the 1992-1993 levels, adjusting for inflation and population growth.
If you feel, as we do, that the federal government should be contributing or investing one-half of 1% of gross domestic product—that is, half a penny for every dollar earned in the country—in post-secondary education, as was done in the late-1970s and early-1980s, then the shortfall is closer to $4 billion.
The impact of underfunding shows up in the human resources crisis, but also in rapidly rising tuition fees and student debt, deteriorating infrastructure, and diminished library holdings, all of which threaten the accessibility and quality of our post-secondary institutions.
The federal government has played the decisive role in funding post-secondary education since the 1950s, when inconsistent and low levels of provincial funding for post-secondary education made it clear there had to be a federal as well as a provincial role. Today, the federal government can and must do more to provide adequate funding to the provinces in an accountable and transparent manner.
The final challenge I want to mention is with regard to research. The federal government has substantially increased research funding in recent years. Much of this, however, has come with an emphasis on applied research that will pay off commercially. The buzzwords have been innovation and commercialization, which, in this lexicon, are synonyms. Basic research, or research whose primary objective is the advancement of knowledge and the understanding of how things work—with no necessary emphasis on practical or commercial gain—is devalued. Yet developments that have proven important and commercially significant typically come from basic research. By devaluing it, we are killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
As Canada's Nobel Laureate, John Polanyi, reminded us several years ago, “When we tie discovery research”—and he was referring to basic research—“ too closely to development, we force our university scientists to run while hobbled in a three-legged race, one leg tied too nearly to industry. This is a mistake we are now making.”
One of Canada's foremost business leaders, Mike Lazaridis, the founder, president, and co-CEO of Research in Motion, put it more pointedly:
I keep hearing that there is something fundamentally wrong with the university research system in Canada. Some very influential people believe that we are not getting the proper “bang for the buck” from our investment in university R&D....
A particularly dangerous version of this thinking holds that professors should patent more.... I have some experience with patenting, and I believe that this is wrong-headed....
Lazaridis continued by saying that the priority should be the funding of basic research:
The number one reason to fund basic research well and with vision is to attract the very best researchers from around the world. Once here, they can prepare Canada’s next generations of graduates, masters, PhDs and post-doctorates, including the finest foreign students. All else flows from this.
A narrow focus on commercialization ignores that the most innovative and valuable research to date normally began with no anticipated commercial outcome, but rather was guided by what knowledgeable scientists thought would be intellectually important to pursue. We encourage the government to increase the amounts of unrestricted grants available through federal granting agencies. This will help protect the integrity and independence of academic research and ensure that proposals are assessed first and foremost on their scholarly merit, the surest way to protect the public interest.
I look forward to answering your questions.