Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'm pleased to be back before this committee as you study the criteria being used to award federal research funding.
Polytechnics and institutes of technology have now been engaged in Canada's research ecosystem for more than 20 years. As experts at partner-driven research, these institutions help organizations of all sizes adopt, implement and commercialize new products and processes through applied research. Despite two decades of doing this work, there are a number of barriers to accessing federal research funding. For the purposes of my remarks today, I'll focus on three.
There is the minimal access to research support funding, a poor understanding of the salary composition of principal investigators at polytechnics, and adjudication criteria that favour research and publication-intensive CVs.
Let's start with the first. The federal government invests more than $450 million each year in the research support fund. According to this fund's website, it supports post-secondary institutions to maintain modern labs and equipment, secure research from threats, enable research management and administrative support and meet regulatory and ethical standards. For polytechnics and colleges, this fund is largely beyond reach. In fact, together they share about half of one per cent of the research support fund. The college and community innovation program is excluded from eligibility calculations, and this means there is virtually no funding for administrative support, research security or maintaining labs and equipment. These activities must be funded elsewhere.
Moving on to the second barrier, polytechnics and colleges hire faculty to be in the classroom and, while their university counterparts are compensated for spending part of their time on research activities, polytechnic instructors have a full teaching load and, as a result, experts drawn from the classroom to participate in research must be backfilled. This wouldn't be a barrier at all if federal research funding programs had faculty release provisions for those who need them. Instead, because programs are built for the university model, my member institutions are actively disadvantaged right from the proposal stages, and this means that winning conditions are missing.
Barrier number three drives to the heart of the matter. The vast majority of federal grants are built on an application process geared to individual principal investigators. Applications are often evaluated based on the background of an individual who is preparing the application. For example, it's relatively common in grant competitions to judge the merit of a proposal by the quality, quantity and significance of past experience and publications.
In the polytechnic context, applied research is a team effort. While research projects are often led by faculty members, activity is delivered out of the office of applied research. While this approach has no diminishing effect on the quality of the research, it raises challenges to participation in a system that is based around the expertise of a single individual. While peer review and research excellence are absolutely important criteria when awarding federal research funding, they aren't sufficient on their own. The current system has a bias toward research that is done in the same way by the same kind of researcher, as it has been well before polytechnics and colleges had even begun developing their research capacity, and this is quite restrictive.
To fully utilize Canada's ecosystem, the process by which funding is awarded must be reviewed and reconsidered.
Thank you very much for inviting me today, and I look forward to your questions.