Madam Chair and members of the standing committee, thank you for this opportunity to be a witness for this very important topic of talent, research and innovation, which directly aligns with the core mission of our foundation.
Since 1925, our not-for-profit national foundation has identified early-career researchers in health and biomedicine across Canada within the first three years of their first faculty appointment, to support their bold ideas and help launch their careers. To date, we've funded over 1,300 young health and biomedical researchers in all fields, ranging from biomedical engineering to public health—totalling $8.6 million—at universities across Canada, through our annual discovery awards program. Our alumni, including such luminaries as Janet Rossant and Henry Friesen, have gone on to secure major research funding and make outstanding discoveries. They have emerged as Canada's leaders in biomedical science.
I have the privilege of chairing this foundation and wish to share with you our concern about the gap in federal support for our young research talent in health and biomedicine research in Canada, as well as our recommendations to address this gap.
Canada faces significant health challenges that impact individuals, our health care systems and our economy. Our most urgent health challenges include recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and the potential next pandemic, climate change, complex diseases such as diabetes, and an aging population. Successfully addressing these challenges to ensure a healthy population and economy requires investing in the people who will generate innovative solutions, driven in large part by the biomedical academic research community.
Our federal government has invested in the training of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, whose bold ideas are often the most innovative within this community. I'm quite aware of the advocacy for increased funding for this group. However, relative to peer countries, including the U.K., Australia, Germany and, importantly, the United States, Canada is underinvesting in science—specifically in early-career researchers in health and biomedicine who have been hired as assistant professors within the first five years of their academic careers.
Unlike other countries, our federal granting agencies do not provide many early-career researchers with competitive funding that would be sufficient to attract our best and brightest post-doctoral fellows to Canadian research faculty positions. The CIHR discontinued its early-career research award program in 2014. A review of the CIHR Banting post-doctoral fellows since 2014 indicates that 35% were recruited to a faculty position outside of Canada, which represents a significant loss of top discovery talent.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. For decade after decade, we have been losing many of our most talented researchers, who have been scooped up elsewhere because Canada cannot compete with the initial salary and research funding offered by other countries. Our Banting discovery awardees, many of whom have trained abroad in some of the most prestigious research centres across the globe, indicate that although they accepted a faculty position in Canada having rejected more lucrative offers from elsewhere, they know many Canadian colleagues who accepted these offers, which are mostly in the United States.
The first five years are the most difficult for early-career researchers, who must juggle setting up their independent research programs, acquiring competitive grant funding, establishing new families and dealing with a university teaching load. For MDs, there are new clinical care responsibilities. It is particularly difficult for women and those who may be struggling with financial debt—some from lower socio-economic backgrounds—after many long years of training.
This raises the issue of equity, diversity and inclusion within our young research talent pool, particularly when we know that the research necessary to address our health inequalities in Canada, such as indigenous people's health challenges, must engage investigators from our diverse communities with lived experiential knowledge.
Therefore, underinvesting in early-career researchers negatively impacts population health, health care resiliency, the competitiveness of the Canadian economy and, ultimately, our ability to effectively attract and retain the talent we need for innovation and its implementation.
Our foundation, along with the Dr. Charles H. Best Foundation, has developed a proposal for a $100-million federal investment over the next 10 years for the recruitment and retention of investigators in health and biomedicine within the first five years of their initial faculty appointments. We have presented this proposal to 26 federal decision-makers and—