Science and Research Committee on Dec. 5th, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

That's a bit over our time. Thank you so much.

If you have additional comments you wish to submit to the clerk, you can certainly do that.

I want to thank our witnesses, Dr. Geoff Horsman, Christian Casanova, Ghyslain Gagnon and Karine Morin, for their testimony and participation in this committee study.

We're going to suspend briefly while we get ready for our next panel.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Welcome back.

For those participating by video conference, please click on the microphone icon to activate your mic. Please mute yourself when you are not speaking. For those on Zoom, interpretation is available, and you have the choice, at the bottom of your screen, of floor, English or French.

It's now my pleasure to welcome, from the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, Wasiimah Joomun, executive director.

From the Canadian Black Scientists Network, we have Dr. Maydianne Andrade, past president and co-founder. She's with us online.

Up to five minutes will be given for opening remarks, after which we'll proceed with our rounds of questions.

Ms. Joomun, I invite you to make an opening statement of up to five minutes.

[Wasiimah Joomun, Executive Director, Canadian Alliance of Student Associations]

Good afternoon, Madam Chair, esteemed committee members and fellow witnesses.

I would like to begin my statement by recognizing that we are meeting today on the territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation.

With our partner Union étudiante du Québec, the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, or CASA, represents 400,000 students across the country.

Innovation, productivity and knowledge production in Canada depend on having capable researchers, including both undergraduate and graduate students. CASA recognizes not only the importance of the immediate knowledge products of research but also the potential of the system to promote the development of talent.

The long-term impact of research is not just in the product but the people. We know, for instance, that only 19% of Ph.D.s become faculty. The remaining 81% go into industry, leveraging their transferable research, technical and critical thinking skills to allow them to understand and solve complex problems in the workplace.

Today, we are presenting recommendations regarding the importance of personal factors in research and the importance of promoting researchers who have traditionally been excluded from the research environment. We are presenting recommendations concerning research projects conducted by professors who recruit students for their research teams and on scholarships directly awarded to the student population.

As regards funding criteria, we want to emphasize that the actual research topic is only one of the factors involved in assessing proposals. CASA wants to emphasize how important it is to assess proposals based on the development of Canadian talent.

Assessments of the training benefits for graduate and undergraduate students supported through federally funded research projects are currently spread across different evaluation criteria during applications. This means that personnel plans can be obscured by other factors. CASA believes that federal funding programs like the insight grants and the discovery grants should have a stand-alone category with a focus on both the quality and the quantity of opportunities for personnel training.

In addition, CASA advocates for institutions with faculty receiving federal research funding to ensure that students involved in these projects receive adequate support. This could be made up of institutional funding, teaching assistantships and private industry support, as well as funding from the federal research grant.

CASA also supports improving access for those students who face barriers participating in Canada's research ecosystem. We encourage the funding agencies to provide feedback for graduate students and postgraduate scholars who fail to receive an award, so that they may improve in future applications.

As a result of the fact that the Vanier scholarships have being consolidated into one new streamlined talent program, Canada has lost the minor funding niche for outstanding international doctoral candidates who work on projects that will benefit the country. We encourage this committee and the government to maintain a flow of funding for doctoral students for which international students are also eligible.

We also acknowledge the importance of constant support for francophone research, and we approve of the recommendations of the Bouchard report on francophone research. We think the committee's report on French-language research contains many promising recommendations on the subject.

Furthermore, indigenous researchers face unique barriers. We have a statement from Benjamin Kucher, chair of the national indigenous advocacy committee at CASA. He wrote:

Supporting Indigenous researchers is essential for fostering equity in academia and advancing diverse perspectives. Evaluation committees must broaden their criteria to value Indigenous methodologies, community-based research, and culturally significant topics. This approach acknowledges the legitimacy of Indigenous knowledge systems and addresses systemic biases. Inclusive evaluation practices empower Indigenous scholars, enrich academic discourse, and contribute to meaningful, community-driven research outcomes that uphold principles of reconciliation and Indigenous sovereignty.

Finally, we wish to note that the new capstone agency will have an ongoing role in ensuring that criteria continue to be relevant. Student representation on the capstone agency's board would represent the student voice in the agency's ongoing program design and oversight.

Canadian student researchers are a key element to driving Canada's productivity and innovation. Our hope for this study is that funding criteria will help them achieve this, not just through research itself but through promoting the development of the skills that will help graduates and their future employers succeed.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you for that.

We will now turn to Dr. Andrade.

I invite you to make an opening statement of up to five minutes.

[Professor Maydianne Andrade, Past-President and Co-founder, Canadian Black Scientists Network]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the committee for inviting me to discuss this important issue. I've thought a lot about research excellence, how we define it and how we assess it. In addition to being on the Canadian Black Scientists Network, I have served as vice-dean of faculty affairs at the University of Toronto Scarborough. In that role, I oversaw assessments and career progression for over 400 faculty members from across fields. I'm also currently the chair of the national Killam selection committee, which adjudicates the Dorothy Killam fellowships and Killam prizes, some of the most prestigious research awards in Canada.

What is research excellence? Most people agree that excellence is consistently producing research that is rigorous, repeatable and transparent, with a positive impact on the field of study or on society. Impact is one of the key elements of excellence, but it can be very hard to assess in the short term. In retrospect, impact often involves disruption and innovation that breaks with conventional thinking or use in a particular area, adding something novel and valuable to theory, practice or translation into benefits for society.

The most commonly used metrics for research excellence in the past were relatively quick and easy to assess and generally fell into two categories. One was output. This included the number of papers, the number of citations and the impact factors, things we've talked about already today. The other was recognition and experience—the number of awards and fellowships you received and your track record of training and related experiences. Were you in the lab of a Nobel Prize winner? Well, then, you must be good.

Canada is now recognized internationally for research excellence. That has been built on supporting researchers from across the country and assessing them with these metrics. But the pathways from research to impact can change, and they are changing. The criteria for assessment have to change with them, or Canada will be left behind. To retain and build Canada's impact, the tri-council and our comparators internationally are evolving to use broader criteria. There is good evidence that the traditional measures no longer capture or encourage excellence. Basically, the ideas that affect Canadians the most are not necessarily the same as the ones that produce the most papers or the most citations.

First, even as the number of publications has skyrocketed in the past decades, the proportion of those papers that are disruptive and truly innovative has plummeted. This was shown most recently in a definitive study published in Nature that looked at 45 million manuscripts and 3.9 million patents from 1945 to 2010. Both showed a significant decline, a 70% to 90% decline, in disruption and novelty. Tallies of papers, patents and impact factors are metrics that are not fit for purpose. Worse, using these as our primary metrics encourages researchers to publish more and more, even if it matters less and less to Canadians.

Second, there's a substantive body of literature showing that recognitions like awards, fellowships and opportunities to do research, particularly in top labs, are affected by identity, not just by scientific promise or excellence, and perceptions of race, gender, socio-economic status and whether you live near a large university. In Canada, the challenge of being pushed to do science in English can affect conventional metrics. For example, a number of studies have shown that standardized application packages and emails are treated differently if the names attached indicate that women or racialized people are submitting them.

Another recent example is the record of Nobel Prize winner Katalin Karikó. Dr. Karikó persisted in science despite outright sexism, being judged as an underperformer and being pushed out of research labs. Her research eventually made it possible to create the mRNA vaccines against COVID. That research was published in a low-impact journal after one review at Nature concluded that her work was not important.

The tri-council has recognized these problems and is seeking to ensure development of the next generation of talent across the country by encouraging researchers to be intentional about inclusive recruitment and mentorship in their publicly funded research labs. It really is about HQP, or highly qualified personnel. This is critical to our future science and innovation ecosystem. We cannot afford to leave talent on the sidelines.

As far as output goes, the tri-council has not discarded the traditional metrics. They're still there. Incremental advancements are still important, but they've added a wider range of assessments and impacts. Canada is not alone in this. As you've already heard, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment has been adopted worldwide. It is a rigorous guide to broadening our understanding of excellence to include a range of impacts and outputs and the accomplishments and talents of diverse people from across the country. Change is never easy, but this evolution of our understanding of measuring excellence is critical to retaining Canada's international impact and our internal fuel for innovation.

Thank you very much for listening to my thoughts.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thanks to both of you for your opening remarks.

I'll now open the floor for questions. Please be sure to indicate to whom your questions are directed.

We'll ask MP Viersen to start off for six minutes, please.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to thank our guests for being here.

I just wanted to note that there's been a relatively high-profile case right here in the Parliament of Canada of the indigenous identity of a cabinet minister coming into question. This is something I just googled minutes earlier around faculty and faculty requirements. I thought, “Maybe this cross-pollinates.” Sure enough, there is an endless list of stories of this.

How do we ensure that if the government is pursuing this DEI, it doesn't happen in the academic world, essentially? You noted that the particular person studying mRNA eventually got their research forward and is a hero today in that.

How do we pursue that excellence without promoting self-identification that isn't necessarily correct?

[Prof. Maydianne Andrade]

Thank you very much for that question. Identity is always a tricky issue. I'm not going to deny that.

I'll start by answering in one way, which is that the guidelines and measures that are in place in our tri-council assessments are around the fair and equitable recruitment and mentorship of trainees. You won't see EDI, as people call it, put in the other two criteria, which are the excellence of the researcher and the excellence of the actual research project. It really is how you ensure that you're not turning away people who have talent because you're in a rush and perhaps there's some sort of bias or you have a connection to some particular lab.

If you're talking more about recruitment of faculty members to try to redress some historical and current imbalances in representation, that is a different question. Some of the institutions are coming up with guidelines for how to think about identity—indigenous colleagues suggest that it involves going to the community as part of that process—but that is not the key aspect of the goal.

I just want to say that I actually despise “EDI” and “DEI” as phrases, because what they're concealing is that there's actually really good evidence that in the absence of corrective measures, people like me, especially when they're junior—not me now, because I'm a professor—are not being treated in a way that's consistent with human rights in Canada. At this particular point in our history, when the Canadian Human Rights Commission has admitted, for example, to anti-Black racism within its walls, it is not likely that we won't see those kinds of phenomena happening elsewhere in our systems.

Thanks for that question.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

We heard about another area earlier this week from Retraction Watch, which has done an excellent job of reporting on falsified or poor research. We heard about a professor from the University of Toronto who works in molecular genetics. One of his papers had been cited over a thousand times by more junior researchers, only for that document to be then retracted.

What kind of collateral impact does this have on the people who have cited this work, when it's now basically up for question? How do we prevent that from happening?

[Prof. Maydianne Andrade]

That is a horrible occurrence, especially when it's something to do with biomedical advances or technologies that are helping people and have led people astray.

It is something that happens all over the research landscape. You can look at any field and find retractions. You'll find that the retractions and the allegations of poor research practice are restricted to a small subset of researchers, so it's not common.

At the same time, what we're doing currently is literally “publish or perish”. When I came up through the system, people said you had to have a lot of papers. It wasn't so much about the quality. Some of us resisted what they used to call “least publishable units”, which means chop it up as fine as possible. That's the kind of mindset that pushes people to fabricate data.

The way we control for that is with things exactly like Retraction Watch. There are people now who have tools and are looking for fabrication in figures and in statistical methodologies. On the other side, really rigorous peer review can protect against this. The problem is that it's not always applied in the ways it should be, because of, to be honest, nepotistic effects.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

I'll move over to the student associations organization.

Do you have any comments around any of the questions I asked the other groups?

[Wasiimah Joomun]

Concerning the comment on indigenous researchers, I think the best way to navigate that, as someone who is not indigenous myself, is going to the community and asking them what they need and, for the capstone organization, looking to have representation and having that ongoing consultation. This is something that we do ourselves with our indigenous researchers and our indigenous students. I think the way to better represent them and to know what they need is to go directly to them and have them around the table.

In terms of fraud, as Maydianne mentioned, it's about rigorous peer review. There's no tolerance for fake information, but we need a process that's more rigorous and does not penalize everyone for bad behaviour. Hopefully, having more rigid criteria would mean that people are not producing articles in volume but in quality.

I think that's why this study is currently happening, too. How do we have those criteria and that impact to ensure that this doesn't keep on happening and there is quality versus quantity being produced?

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you. That is a good place to end. It's a little bit over.

Now I'll turn to MP Jaczek for six minutes.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to both our witnesses.

I will start with you, Dr. Andrade. Congratulations on your recent award at the Canadian science policy conference here in Ottawa. We're very pleased to see you as one of our witnesses.

During the course of this study, we have heard some implications from other witnesses that there is a requirement to espouse progressive points of view as opposed to perhaps more conservative views. In your experience, have you ever been aware of this type of requirement in terms of funding applications by individuals or organizations?

[Prof. Maydianne Andrade]

Thank you for that question and for the congratulations.

I think that it is sometimes the case that people can be in a department that, say, has a particular culture, and they may feel pressured to speak in particular ways or use particular language. Our funding agencies, though, have a rubric, and the rubric is pretty extensive.

As I said, for example, for the NSERC discovery grants, which I'm most familiar with, there are three chunks. One chunk is the excellence of the research. Equity, diversity and inclusion don't show up in there, unless you're doing something that has to do with gender, in which case you have to deal with GBA+, which just means you're doing good research. There's the excellence of the researcher, and then there's highly qualified personnel.

In Canada, if you haven't thought through how to deal with the fact that you're going to get diverse applicants and that there are well-documented unintentional effects of bias on how we judge each other, then you're not doing your job as a researcher. We're publicly funded. We have an obligation to the people of Canada, which includes everyone in Canada. Then, on the flip side, we need to make sure that we are, in fact, allowing that talent to grow where it is.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Thank you for that.

Ms. Joomun, I think you've heard some of the witnesses' positions as well in terms of some sort of bias towards more progressive points of view that need to be somehow expressed in the grant application. Are you aware of anything among all your agencies or all the students you represent?

[Wasiimah Joomun]

From what we've heard from students, the narrative CV does help with people bringing a little bit more of their perspective, but I think it's about having that diverse perspective and the investment in people that we have. I do agree with Dr. Andrade there. We are trying to have many diverse perspectives around the table and do justice to the federal funding program. If you are to do research for the economy and for the innovation of the country, you are kind of investing in the talent and the skills of the people.

When we look at research, we look not just at the particular project but also at the people we're investing in, because these are the people in future years who will become innovators and entrepreneurs and will be hiring people. Having that diverse perspective allows for a diversity of people and investment in diverse people within the system.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Are you seeing that impact in the types of training opportunities that are available to students? You're seeing results, I presume.

[Wasiimah Joomun]

Studies and research have shown that five years after graduating, doctoral students make, on average, regardless of streams, around $94,000 per year, so you can see that, in the long term, there is some investment in the skills. They might not necessarily be using them directly in their research, but they have transferable skills and critical thinking skills in starting their start-up or working for a company. The long-term investment is there, and we see our students really having the benefit of learning in school while being a graduate student and then transferring that into the workforce. I think the country definitely needs to expand that, when we look at the unemployment and the labour shortage that we're experiencing.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Thank you.

Dr. Andrade, another comment from a witness earlier today that I think was very appealing was how a particular research application leads to improving Canadian economic prosperity.

To what extent is that kind of criterion used in the evaluation of any particular funding by the tri-council, in your experience? Are you aware of such a need to look at potential economic prosperity?

[Prof. Maydianne Andrade]

I think it depends on the case the researcher makes in their area of study. There are some where you could draw a fairly direct line to economic benefits—for example, if you're an engineer, if you're patenting things that you're bringing to market or if you're talking about translational research. If you're talking about biomedical research, you can argue that by easing the disease burden in Canada, we'll be improving the economy as well. There are fields that are like that.

There are others, where there are incremental gains that aren't immediately obvious. To go back to the example of Dr. Karikó, that paper was published in 2005 and it was used in 2020. It's very hard, in any one short-term research project, to demonstrate economic advantage. If we gut that, the opportunity isn't there. I don't know what would have happened or how much longer it would have taken to get a vaccine against COVID if we hadn't had that paper from 2005.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Thank you.

Do I have any time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

You have half a minute.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Ms. Joomun, have you, your students and the organizations thought about ensuring that there is some reference to potential future economic prosperity?

[Wasiimah Joomun]

Yes, of course. One statement I remember hearing some students say is that to find a solution for a problem tomorrow, you need to start doing research yesterday. I think this is the important part. Research doesn't happen overnight.

When we look at the multidisciplinary part of research, it doesn't just take one type of person; you need a whole ecosystem. When you look at the prosperity of the research ecosystem, the work.... As Dr. Andrade very nicely mentioned, something that was published in 2005 was being used in 2020. Let's say this was not published in 2005. Would we have gotten there?

I think it's about realizing and recognizing that the research ecosystem is more holistic and that it doesn't happen overnight. It takes years of work from different people around the table to get to where we want to be.