I would venture to say that almost all of them are, and some of them are doing work that's very complementary to their studies. For example, they are teaching assistants in undergraduate labs, so they're enhancing their professional skill development and teaching skills. Those are great opportunities, but more and more students, even ones on the best federal scholarships, are also taking part-time jobs as servers in restaurants and other types of positions, because of costs.
I think the other critical thing to consider here is that not only are the students living below the poverty line, but they're also paying tuition to the institution, which, depending on the institution, is going to be $6,000, $7,000 or $10,000-plus that you have to take off the top of those scholarships. What is left is then what they have to pay for rent and food. One thing that most Canadian universities don't do is tuition remissions for graduate students, so I think that's also a really important concern.
Very often I have students ask me if they can take on an additional TA job or something like that. As their supervisor, I don't want to say no, even though I know it's going to take away from their research activities. I also understand that they need to pay their bills. As students get older and become post-docs, there's also a greater chance that they're thinking about starting families and doing other things that really have to be taken into consideration as well.