With the recent investment they made in the United States with the CHIPS Act, their graduate fellows earn around $50,000 a year Canadian compared to $17,500 for the Canadian master's funding that is provided, as an equivalent.
To address your question from the beginning, I work with students every single day from coast to coast to coast, and for the past three years the number one thing I've been hearing from Vancouver Island all the way to the east coast is concern about affordability. We have also heard similar concerns about students accessing food banks at higher rates and really being concerned about being able to afford to get an education. There have been investments in the sciences, specifically in the 2018 budget, but unfortunately that money hasn't trickled down to the amounts for graduate students, who are still living off the same amounts that they were in 2003.