By creating a research program on the minority communities, it was as though the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the CIHR, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the SSHRC, were sending a message that research is legitimate.
I submitted a project to a regular competition, that is to say one that did not concern the minority communities. In that case, we were evaluated by other anglophone or francophone researchers from Quebec who did not necessarily understand the problems of the minority communities . My application was rejected on the following grounds: why conduct research on minority health services when francophones are bilingual? I mentioned that in the brief. We have to justify ourselves. It takes only a minor objection by an evaluator for one's application to be rejected.
When a program concerns minority communities, agencies send the message that it is legitimate to conduct research on the communities. We do not have to convince anybody. We take it for granted that the people evaluating us have understood that it is important to conduct research. They properly evaluate the projects that are submitted. This is really a way of lowering the barriers that were noted by the study of the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages on research. This is one way of lowering the barriers that minority researchers face.