Ms. Pilote was putting you on the right track. It's absolutely essential to work with the granting councils.
There is indeed the matter of funding, but more needs to be done about the equitable assessment of grant applications submitted to the councils.
Over the past few months, we've been working with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the CIHR, to design training modules on unconscious bias in the assessment of grant applications. Can assessors, owing to their position, introduce bias into how they perceive and understand research projects submitted to them?
We're trying to look at the content of these tools and how we might prevent bias in terms of language and the research topics chosen by francophone researchers.
These tools should be used well beyond the CIHR. All the granting councils should have access to them.
Let's take the obvious example of simultaneous interpretation at the peer assessment committee meetings, where the language skills of the assessors are self-declared.
Assessors who consider themselves to have a high enough level of proficiency in French to read and understand a French-language application may be misled when comments are poorly translated or when the references cited are misunderstood. This could lead to a researcher's application being negatively assessed when that same application might have been accepted by another committee with someone more proficient in French.