Every graduate and undergraduate department in the country has to be reviewed periodically by external reviewers. It was in that context that colleagues from the University of Alberta and Western University went to an institution that I won't name and discovered how desperately poor their graduate students were. Scientists take a long time to change. They were still accepting students at the levels they had previously, even though their grants had flattened out and expenses had gone up.
Our recommendation was that they have to pay these students a living wage, that they have to give them more money, which means taking fewer students. For most of the institutions I've seen across Canada, I would have the same recommendation.
I think that even though we're slow at making change, as this kind of movement makes it more and more clear to PIs that their students are struggling to this extent—going to food banks—this is going to happen across the country. It's going to gut our innovation ecosystem.
