That's actually a very important question you raise because, as I said, there is no clear definition of post-doc in any provincial legislation, and that causes a lot of problems when it comes to different universities because the university, or the research institution will decide how to define a post-doc.
I can tell you that there are universities in Quebec that define post-docs as “students”. There are universities in Quebec that call them “faculty”. In B.C. it is the same thing. Some universities call them “faculty”, but still they are not getting the benefits that faculty get. Some of them are called “staff”. Some of them are even classified as part of the administration.
The situation is basically similar in every province we have done this study in. With respect to the post-docs policy, I think it's very important to have a definition about who is a post-doc and what their responsibilities are and, in terms of compensation, what the bare minimum is that the institution needs to consider.
This will cause a lot of precarity and uncertainty, which we see in different universities. I have seen a post-doc being paid only $25,000 per year, which is not even comparable with what a Ph.D. student who is being supported gets.
That's basically all about the policy, but of course there are lots of things. We need to do more surveys. We need to be more aware of things, but CAPS itself is a team of volunteers and we do not have access to permanent funding or annual funding. Whenever we want to do a specific survey, we just reach out to tri-agencies or other agencies to see if we can get funded for it. At a bare minimum, we want to conduct a national survey for post-docs every four years.