Thank you for the invitation to speak with you today. I join you from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, located within Treaty 6 territory, homeland of the Métis nation.
I'm a Ph.D. student and occasional sessional lecturer in biology at the University of Saskatchewan. I've served as president of my department's biology graduate student association, and I currently serve as the senior student post-doctoral counsellor for the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution. These roles have informed my experience of the incredible talent we have in Canada, as well as the challenges and hard choices that today's early career researchers face, but I come to you today just as myself—a Canadian woman highly trained in the life sciences, and hopeful for where the next step might take me.
You've heard from witnesses in the past few weeks of the typical career trajectory someone like me can be expected to follow. Even after earning my bachelor's degree more than 10 years ago, I'm still considered an early career researcher. As such, I still have many forks in the road ahead. Whether those diverging paths lead to industry, government or academia, it is critical that those those forks become opportunities for choice rather than pinch points where we lose talent.
My research seeks to understand how animals make choices about what to do with limited energetic resources. Can I thrive and invest in my future, the next generation, or am I barely hanging on just to survive for another day? I see reflected in the squirrels that I study as a biologist the trade-offs we must make with limited resources as early career researchers, but I also see what increased resources can let happen: Individuals can survive and thrive.
Canada is an incredibly educated country. That comes about because we champion our many existing strengths. They are strengths like the existence of our distinct research-based master's programs that are considered significant accomplishments in their own right. These programs help ensure a workforce equipped with research-based skill sets for individuals who do not want or need to pursue a full Ph.D., or who want to pursue a different path for their Ph.D. In my case, I completed a master's studying mouse genomics and decided to take those skills into a different arena for my Ph.D., studying ecology and evolution. Investing in master's students means investing in Canada.
The next major training stage is the Ph.D.—that's if you can secure the very competitive but low levels of funding. If you can squeak by, by the end of this apprenticeship the researcher now has years of hands-on experience in statistics, communication and creative problem-solving. That can all serve to solve the problems of today and tomorrow, and make the advancements we need in order to move society forward. The Ph.D. is long. It's oftentimes very tough. But it produces a mind keen ready to put those sharpened skills to work. Investing in Ph.D. students means investing in Canada.
But where to put them to work, and with what funding? We now come to another major fork in the road that has massive ramifications for the life and career of the individual and for the nation's workforce. You see, at this point, the researcher has spent years paying ever-rising tuition with stipends that have remained stagnant for years. Those are years of not being able to build savings that make a relatively low-paying post-doctoral position less attractive. Even the prestigious NSERC post-doctoral fellowships, which are highly competitive, are still worth only $45,000 a year. This alone can make the lure of well-funded post-docs or more competitive industrial salaries outside of Canada an undeniable option—a pinch point, after so much investment in these individuals, now threatened by limited opportunity to bridge them into the sectors where they're most needed. Investing in post-docs means investing in Canada.
Canada, by investing in education and innovation, has invested in me. I now see the next fork in the road ahead for myself. Where do I put my skills to work, and with what funding? Is having a family compatible with a career in science, or will I become another “leaky pipeline” statistic? We have mechanisms in place that have proven time and time again to work, things like Mitacs and tri-council agency funding, but like a once-strong muscle that's been left to atrophy, the dollar value and accessibility of these mechanisms will weaken over time if not regularly reinvested in.
That the committee I speak to this evening was formed through a unanimous vote speaks volumes to the value that citizens and our representatives place on the health of the science and research ecosystem in Canada. As early career researchers trained in Canada, we want to stay. We want to do the work. To commit to a career rooted in science and research is to profess our conviction that a better future is in our hands for the making. We just need the resources to survive and thrive.
Thank you.