It's closely linked to Bill C‑13; that's clear. I won't comment on the French-language research situation around the world. I'll be focusing on Canada because the data we have concerns this country. It comes from the study we conducted together with some leading researchers.
Here are a few figures. In 2020, there were 63,455 francophone researchers in Canada, 30,070 of whom worked in francophone minority communities. Broadly speaking, that number was almost evenly divided between Quebec and the other provinces.
Researchers who conduct research in French in Quebec don't experience the issues that the other 30,000 researchers in the other provinces encounter. These are two worlds, two completely different universes.
You mentioned dissemination. I'll begin by discussing the support provided for research production.
Researchers need research funding. There are three granting councils. First, at the federal level, there's the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. However, according to the figures in the report we published, the percentages of funding granted to francophone researchers are less than those of funding granted to anglophone researchers. You could say that's not unusual if it represented a proportional distribution among anglophone and francophone researchers, but that's not the case. Consider this example. Only 5% to 12% of funding applications submitted to the granting councils are prepared in French, whereas francophone researchers represent 21% of the research community.
Here's the reason for that discrepancy. In many cases, researchers conducting research in French at a bilingual or English-language university can't submit their funding applications in French because authorities at their institutions are unable to assess their French submissions. Bear in mind that applications may be several tens of pages long. Consequently, researchers either don't submit them or they prepare them in English, which isn't their first language. We can assume that the quality of those applications isn't as high as if they had been prepared in the researchers' native language. So there's a problem at the outset.
There's no substantive equality with researchers who conduct research in English, even though francophone researchers are absolutely entitled to it. I'm not taking a confrontational stance here; I just want to promote substantive equality. In Canada, we're entitled to want to study in French, to conduct research in French and to teach in French. We simply should have the same conditions as researchers and students who choose to do so in English enjoy. All the figures show that this is unfortunately not the case.
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