Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ladies and gentlemen members of the committee, good afternoon.
It is an honour for the École de technologie supérieure, or ETS, to take part in this exercise alongside other Canadian research leaders. Thank you for inviting us to participate.
My name is Christian Casanova, and I am vice president of research and partnerships at ETS. I am joined by Ghyslain Gagnon, dean of research. As both of us are researchers, we are particularly concerned about research funding criteria.
The mission of ETS, which ranks second among engineering faculties in Canada, is to further technological and economic development across the country through applied research activities that contribute directly to technological innovation. We are certain that practical solutions to the great upheavals of our society are generated by research and innovation.
As you obviously know, federal granting agencies, in recent years, have begun to lean toward adjusting evaluation criteria within their communities. In 2019, five of those organizations signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, or DORA, which represents a major change that now makes it possible to give preference to the qualitative aspects of projects.
The research that is done at ETS focuses mainly on engineering, and the vast majority of our federal funding comes from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, or NSERC. We believe that organization has adopted changes in a rigorous and adequate manner. Although we are satisfied that present evaluation criteria will yield results over the long term, we have uncovered four promising ways in which to exploit the potential of the entire research community in Canada and to generate even greater impacts for Canadians.
First of all, the data are very clear: French-speaking researchers who work in a minority community in Canada face major barriers that prevent them from working as productively as they otherwise could in their official language of choice.
Since linguistic duality is central to our Canadian identity, the universities and federal granting agencies have an important role to play. Given this disadvantage, it is vital that we promote equity for French-language research by setting percentage targets for grant applications submitted in French and for their success rate. Meeting those targets would help better represent the 22% of the population of Canada who speak French, a currently underexploited potential source of knowledge.
Second, we recommend that funding applications continue to be reviewed based on DORA principles and criteria. At the same time, we advise that those principles be promoted in our scientific community, particularly in the context of awareness campaigns designed to emphasize that DORA makes it possible to assess the intrinsic quality of research in a number of forms. Furthermore, as the evaluation of DORA principles and criteria must be applied more broadly, we encourage the granting agencies to provide incentives to stimulate the scientific community's active participation in the review process.
It is important to allow a period of time in which to adapt to these changes and fully and objectively measure their impact on the real and complex issues in our society. Any turning back, which would reintroduce quantitative parameters that have previously proven to be unreliable would be counterproductive.
Third, ETS is persuaded that the complex challenges of our society require interdisciplinary and intersectoral research teams. Consequently, as it has been proven that excellence and impacts are harder to demonstrate in an interdisciplinary research setting, we hope that the evaluation criteria are adapted in such a way as to encourage this type of research. If budgets are established in existing programs and new programs are created for interdisciplinary research, more researchers will join forces to address our country's priority issues.
Lastly, ETS would like to highlight the ecosystem's efforts to create research environments that promote equity, diversity and inclusion, or EDI. However, we recommend that EDI criteria focus on elements specific to research projects and that they be limited to the value of the proposal where applicable. In real terms, we suggest that EDI criteria be withdrawn from recruitment and integration plans and be replaced by institutional guidelines with which projects will have to comply, including continuous evaluation and improvement measures.
That would simplify the process and guarantee real impact.