Thank you.
I thank the witnesses for being with us this evening.
I'm going to start with Professor Lagacé.
To get something clear, you talked about a low success rate in funding competitions, presumably for francophone applicants, yet, at least from NSERC, we heard Marc Fortin testify that of the applicants from the University of Ottawa who applied in French versus those who applied in English, the francophone applicants had a higher success rate. There seems to be some difference in that. I wanted to point that out.
You also suggested giving francophone researchers help in translating from French to English. I assume that's so they could do their research in French and publish in English.
We've heard from other witnesses that if you want them to apply in French, even though they are francophone, they need help from other francophones to figure out how to best fill out those applications in French. It doesn't seem logical on the surface, but they were surrounded by people applying in English who could help them in English.
We seem to have this dilemma of accepting that the lingua franca of world publishing, at least in science, is English. It seems to me that there's little that Canada, as a country or a federal government, could do to to change that.
What, specifically, could the federal government do to encourage French research in Canada, especially in the natural sciences, which is a world I come from? How can we help that while still recognizing this big elephant in the room, which is that everybody in science in the world is publishing in English?