Thank you, Madam Chair.
My name is Jonathan Desroches, and I am the president of the Quebec Student Union, the UEQ.
The UEQ represents 91,000 university students in Quebec and, at the federal level, works in partnership with the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, or CASA. Together UEQ and CASA represent more than 365,000 undergraduate and graduate students across the country.
I would first like to thank the committee for its invitation to appear and present students' views on research issues to the federal government.
The work you are doing is important and will ultimately shed light on the underfunding of the student scholarship programs of the three federal granting councils: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, or SSHRC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, NSERC, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, or CIHR. This underfunding has major consequences for the entire research ecosystem in Canada. Moreover, all the witnesses with whom you have addressed this matter in recent months have acknowledged that the student programs of the federal granting councils are not adequately funded.
The following figures will help explain the problem. In the past 10 years, NSERC's budget allocation for academic scholarships has declined from 13% to 8% of total funding. For SSHRC, that share was 17% 10 years ago and is now 13%. The figure for CIHR has fallen from 7% to 5% over the same period. However, it is virtually impossible to access CIHR's numbers and therefore difficult to form a comprehensive picture of the situation.
The UEQ estimates that a $120 million investment would be necessary to restore the percentage of funding granted to scholarship programs to its level of 10 years ago. That funding must be used to address one of the concerns raised in the 2017 Naylor report: longer scholarship terms. Master's scholarships are currently granted for one year and doctoral awards for three years, whereas a master's degree generally takes at least two years to complete and a doctorate four.
The result is thus that our students' incomes are cut off at their source in the final years of their postgraduate programs. This extends the time it takes to complete their studies as they are then forced to find alternative sources of income to support themselves as they complete their doctorates. It can even make it impossible to complete a degree.
The holder of the Canada Research Chair on the Transformations of Scholarly Communication at the Université de Montréal has shown that students who receive funding are more likely to earn a degree than those who do not. This is obviously not surprising.
For scholarships genuinely to enable students to focus on their master's or doctoral degrees, the values of those scholarships must be adequate. As one witness told this committee a few weeks ago, funding amounts for scholarships have not changed in two decades. I am referring, for example, to NSERC's $21,000 and SSHRC's $20,000 scholarships. Scholarship amounts must be high enough to enable students to focus on their studies and research. Indexing those scholarships would obviously be a good way to prevent them from losing their value in the long term.
If we are to increase the number of students who choose to undertake a doctorate, to conduct high-level research and to participate, now or later, in innovative work in all research sectors and fields in Canada, the number of scholarships offered by the student programs of the federal granting councils will have to increase. Underfunding prevents us from taking advantage of the talent pool we already have. Excellent candidates are many. They must be supported.
As in anything else, funding is obviously the central problem, but there is another factor that requires no investment and that can improve the situation. Unlike the situation in Quebec, there is no student representation on the boards of the federal granting councils. Students are represented on the boards of all the institutions of the Fonds de recherche du Québec, the provincial counterpart of the federal granting councils. Students have no voice on the federal granting councils, and we suspect that is one of the reasons why students' problems are overlooked.
To improve the situation, we encourage you to draw on the model established by Quebec's chief scientist, Rémi Quirion, and amend the enabling statutes of the three federal granting councils to add student representation to their boards.
In conclusion, I would note that master's and doctoral degrees are the gateway to careers in research and innovation. Graduate students are not merely the researchers of tomorrow; they are also today's researchers because they are already making considerable contributions to scientific publications and developing knowledge as they study. They must be provided with the resources to continue those efforts.
Thank you. I will be pleased to speak with you at greater length.