Science and Research Committee on Oct. 31st, 2022

[Stéphane Lauzon, Liberal, Argenteuil—La Petite-Nation, QC]

Mr. Blanchette-Joncas has proposed an amendment consisting of adding the date.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Madam Chair, it should specify that the invitation is valid on or after November 21. If the Minister if available to come to the next committee meeting, on November 14, we will not have started the new study yet.

Without making any assumptions about the Minister's schedule, I think the best way of starting the committee's next study is to invite the Minister to a meeting on November 21 or November 28.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you.

Mr. Lauzon, are you comfortable with what Mr. Blanchette-Joncas has suggested?

[Stéphane Lauzon, Liberal, Argenteuil—La Petite-Nation, QC]

Yes, of course.

The amendment is moved by Mr. Blanchette-Joncas.

Mr. Clerk, we just add the date as an amendment from Maxime Blanchette-Joncas.

[The Clerk]

Instead of saying "in November", we could say "on November 21".

[Stéphane Lauzon, Liberal, Argenteuil—La Petite-Nation, QC]

We would have to say "on or after November 21".

[The Clerk]

Right.

[Stéphane Lauzon, Liberal, Argenteuil—La Petite-Nation, QC]

It has to say that the amendment was moved by Mr. Blanchette-Joncas.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

Is there agreement amongst the committee on this?

(Amendment agreed to)

(Motion as amended agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

That's terrific. Thank you, Mr. Blanchette-Joncas.

It is now my job to thank our witnesses.

We thank you for your time, your effort and your expertise. We hope it's been a good experience for you. We hope that you will consider coming back and seeing us again.

Committee, with that, we are going to suspend briefly so we can set up our second panel.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Dear colleagues, I'm going to call us back to order.

Welcome back to the committee.

We are on our second panel tonight. I'd like to welcome and thank our witnesses for being so gracious.

This panel goes until 8:30 tonight.

I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of the new witnesses.

Before speaking, please wait for me to say your name. If you are participating by videoconference, click on the microphone icon to activate your microphone. Please put yourself on mute when you are not speaking.

For the interpretation, if you are participating in the meeting via Zoom, you have a choice of channels, at the bottom of your screen, between floor, English and French. If you are in the room, you can use the headset and select the channel you want.

I would remind you that all comments by members and witnesses must be addressed to the chair.

I would now like to welcome our witnesses, who are appearing as individuals.

We have Janice Bailey, scientific director, nature et technologies, Fonds de recherche du Québec. We also have Yves Gingras, professor of history and sociology of science at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Each will have five minutes to present. At the four and a half minute mark, I will hold up this card to let you know that you have 30 seconds left. We aim to be fair.

Once again, a warm welcome to our witnesses.

We'll begin with Janice Bailey, please, for five minutes.

[Dr. Janice Bailey, Scientific Director, Nature et technologies, Fonds de recherche du Québec, As an Individual]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I've chosen to speak in English. I thought I was going to be speaking in French, but when I did my homework, I realized that most of the members of the committee have a preference for English. I'm certainly functional in both languages, however.

My name is Janice Bailey, and as mentioned, I am the scientific director of the Fonds de recherche du Québec, nature et technologies, or the FRQNT, which is one of three government organizations supporting and promoting research in Quebec.

Before taking this position in 2019, I was a professor-researcher at Université Laval for 25 years, specializing in the field of reproduction. I worked on animals, humans and the effects of the environment on the health of future generations. I speak today in this consultation on my own behalf.

I'm from Brandon, Manitoba. I am anglophone. I started my research career in English at the University of Manitoba and continued through the University of Guelph and the Perelman school of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

I developed my expertise, my reputation as an expert and my network of contacts in an English-speaking world, but I was offered a position as a professor at Université Laval in 1994. Thus, my husband, who is also a researcher and an anglophone from southern Ontario, and I decided to continue our adventure in the scientific community in French, and we headed for Quebec. It was difficult because neither I nor my husband spoke French very well at the time, but it paid off in the end. Actually, this ability to speak French has provided us with tremendous access to rich scientific communities and networks, which has considerably broadened our professional opportunities. I would not be in this chair today if I did not speak French.

We have conducted research projects in both languages, disseminated our knowledge in both languages and established valuable collaborations in Quebec, Canada, and elsewhere in the world in English and in French. Although we speak English at home, our days are in French, and our son, who is now an adult, studied in French in high school, CEGEP and university. We really believe in the importance of French.

This openness to French has also allowed me to see that research knowledge is partly invisible if it's only in English. The English language is certainly the first language of science in the world, but it is essential to have access to scientific knowledge produced in other languages. In Canada, we have French, of course, but we also have indigenous languages.

We must not or cannot really fight science in English, and that's not my point, but we need to promote it better in French, including research and publications in French. Science is conducted for the well-being and progress of society. Science in French, or any other language, is just as important as science in English. Restricting science to a single language drastically limits its accessibility. As a professor, for those 25 years, I taught in French and regularly conducted public outreach activities in French, often with my graduate students.

Access to knowledge produced in different languages is particularly important in areas such as the natural sciences. I emphasize that access to indigenous vocabulary and traditional knowledge should enhance our understanding of, for example, biodiversity sciences. The future of the planet is at stake, and languages participate in this knowledge and circulation of knowledge.

The circulation of knowledge in a variety of languages also strengthens public confidence in science and research. The phenomenon of misinformation, however, has grown over the past decade, particularly with the emergence of social media.

Scientific information is one of the victims of this misinformation, and disinformation hinders the link between science and society. It undermines the credibility of scientific information and has consequences for individual and collective decision-making and policies on important issues. Access to quality knowledge in a variety of languages based on robust data developed by science and research should be a societal priority. Personally, I don't really like social media, but I pay attention to it. The FRQNT is very active in promoting research in French.

Canada is a rich country—among the richest in the world. We complain, but we are very privileged. Our wealth comes with an obligation to share, especially with less-privileged countries. Scientific knowledge is part of our wealth and must circulate freely. It must be accessible to as many people as possible. This is access that passes through language. The French-speaking scientific communities of Canada and Quebec can be and should be very proactive and build bridges with French-speaking scientific communities where the needs are very great. For example, I have worked—

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

I'm sorry to interrupt. Thank you, Professor Bailey. Thank you for being here and for your testimony. There will be lots of questions.

With that, we will go to Professor Gingras.

The floor is yours for five minutes.

[Yves Gingras, Professor of History and Sociology of Science, Université du Québec à Montréal, As an Individual]

Thank you for this invitation. I imagine that I have been invited here because I have been working on the issue of the transformation of science for nearly 40 years. In 1984, I published the first article offering a sociological explanation for what is called the value of a language in a scientific field. In 1991, I participated in a study commissioned by the Government of Quebec on the presence of French in scientific publications. I have also worked with Camille Limoges, who for a long time held the position of deputy minister in Quebec, on a study on the use of manuals in science courses. What strikes me is the reason why we are back here, 40 years later, discussing the same problem: it is because we use general, conflated categories that are not sufficiently precise.

I am therefore going to use the three minutes I have left to at least untangle the problems. I want to make sure that the action the government takes is rational and effective. I am going to show you that it is very easy to have visions that are generous but are inapplicable and do not correspond with the reality and dynamics of science.

The first of these is that we have to stop talking about science in general terms. It doesn't mean anything. We have to separate the natural sciences, on one hand, from the social sciences and humanities, on the other, for one very simple reason: the dynamics in the scientific community of researchers is totally different.

Since the early 1980s, in the natural sciences, for example physics, chemistry or biology, the universal language of academic journals has been English. That must not be confused with the teaching of science in francophone universities, which is done in French, and the language of manuals or course notes, which also have to be in French. On the one hand, we have the market for scientific publishing; on the other, life in the laboratory. In my opinion, in a laboratory at the Université de Montréal, for example, things have to be done in French; the teaching has to be in French and the manuals have to be accessible in that language. So we must not talk about science in general terms.

When an electron is discovered, for example, that is very specialized. We have this generous idea that the public must have access to the knowledge because it is the public who are paying, but that is absurd. With all due respect, I have to say that probably no one among you here would understand an article about artificial intelligence. That is not a big deal, since the function of francophone science journalists and popular science journals in French, like Québec Science, is to make very technical knowledge accessible in French, for example regarding quantum computers, knowledge that is generally published in very specialized academic journals. Québec Science is in French. Knowledge is being made accessible in French by Quebec researchers like Yoshua Bengio who publish their fundamental work in the language of computing, which is English.

We therefore have to stop mixing everything together and thinking that translating all scientific publications into both languages will have an effect. A bit later, if we have time, I will tell you about France, where that exact experiment was done, and I predicted its failure. Ten years later, in fact, a stop was put to the experiment, which consisted of systematically translating sociology and political science journals that were completely in English, as if there was a pre-existing market, when there was no demand. Millions of euros were wasted because physics, sociology, history and mathematics were mixed together. The dynamics of the scientific communities are different and that has to be taken into account.

In the case of French, the most important thing for us is to make sure that the practices followed in the natural sciences are not applied to the social sciences and humanities. That is what is being done in the universities by evaluating so-called international journals. A little earlier in the meeting, the term "impact factor" was used. Impact factor is an obsession in the natural sciences that has been transposed to the social sciences. I have written an entire book on that subject. I showed how widespread the confusion was between the impact factor, which measures the impact of an academic journal's impact, and the article itself. They are not the same thing. There is a huge amount of confusion.

In a spirit of generosity, it is thought that translating scientific articles is suddenly going to make the science more visible. I hope I will have time during the question period that follows to show you in detail that if we want to solve problems, we have to explain what we are talking about every time. Are we talking about research in physics or in sociology? Are we talking about the Érudit platform or open access? Are we talking about Plan S open access in Europe? These are all different things, and when they are all mixed together, it creates confusion and ineffectiveness.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you, Professor Gingras.

I'd like to thank both of you for being here. We're grateful for your time. You have an eager committee that wants to hear from you.

We will now go to our first round of questions. This will be for six minutes.

I'm not sure who's starting with the Conservative Party tonight.

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Madam Chair, that will be me.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you so much, Mr. Soroka. The floor is yours.

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for coming.

I'll start off with Ms. Bailey, because she comes from a unique scenario.

Most of us are French speakers who then learned English. However, you started the other way around.

One thing previous witnesses talked about was how French speakers applying in the French language were not getting as good a result as English researchers applying for grants. Have you noticed this as well? Were you doing your grants in English or French?

[Dr. Janice Bailey]

Thank you for that question.

As a researcher, when I applied to federal funding agencies, I wrote my grants in English. When I applied to French funding agencies, such as the one I'm now at the head of, I always wrote my applications in French.

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Did you notice whether there was any difference in getting better results?

[Dr. Janice Bailey]

Honestly, I believe some of the comments that might occur could be anecdotal.

Certainly, writing scientifically in a language that is not your mother tongue.... Even now, after 30 years, it's harder for me to write in French than in English, but I do it all the time. It is hard to write. I think you need some extra help to write in a different language. Certainly, for anglophones writing in French, it's a lot harder. You need some help to be concise. Scientific writing is ultraconcise. Our grant applications are very small, so you're always asked to keep things trim. You need help.

I'm not sure if I answered appropriately, but, yes, it's hard. From one language to the other, it's hard. It's hard for me to write science applications in English and, probably, hard in French for people with French.

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

My question was if you were more successful writing English or French applications. They said people who write French applications aren't as successful.

[Dr. Janice Bailey]

Do they have data that shows that?

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

That's what they were insinuating, so I was wondering if you found that.

[Dr. Janice Bailey]

In my own experience, I don't see that.

It's harder. It takes longer. There's more work to do. I think people working in French in the Canadian context.... We always have to have our CV in French and English. We have to write our research summaries in French and English, so that's a bit of a pain, but I don't know if the success rates are truly different. I have not seen data to suggest that.