Science and Research Committee on May 9th, 2023

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

I'll be sharing my time with Maxime. Maxime can have the two and a half minutes.

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

Thank you very much, respected colleague.

Mr. Chair, I will continue my questions with Ms. De Jaegher.

I listened carefully to your presentation. What saddens me even more than all the data is that you said that you may not have continued your studies at the graduate level had you known that it was so difficult and that the financial support was inadequate.

Mr. Chair, what message is being sent to the next generation today by putting young people in a precarious situation that hurts their mental health? What Ms. De Jaegher said today is very important.

All of this data has given you a good picture, Ms. De Jaegher. As a professor-researcher, could you tell me more about the role that master's and doctoral students play in laboratories or in scientific production in general?

[Justine De Jaegher]

Their role is critical to the research conducted by our members, especially since they have a variety of service, research and teaching responsibilities as part of their academic careers. We would like to see more funding for research-related scholarships in general so that our members do not have to choose between paying minimum wage to several graduate students to support them in their work and paying a higher salary to one or two students.

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

Thank you very much.

There is a perception that students are just training while in graduate school, but as I understand it, they are doing much more than that. They actively contribute to scientific research and teaching activities at our universities.

In your opinion, what will be the threats to the Quebec and Canadian scientific ecosystem if master's and doctoral students abandon their studies or go elsewhere for lack of financial support?

[Justine De Jaegher]

I will give you an example.

We have seen cases of underfunding among francophone researchers in minority settings, for example at Laurentian University. This has resulted in our francophone minority researchers losing jobs and research scholarships.

That is why the post-secondary system and the research system need to be looked at, as it is all connected.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you.

Mr. Collins, you can wrap this up. You have two and a half minutes.

[Chad Collins, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Thanks, Mr. Chairman, and welcome.

Ms. De Jaegher, I want to address the issue of housing, which you raised earlier. We've heard from witnesses on a number of recommendations in terms of increasing the value of contributions and increasing the number of people who receive graduate scholarship and post-doctoral fellowship program support, so there will be some consistent recommendations that flow through to the committee. We'll have discussions about that later.

One thing we haven't looked at is support from other ministries on how we can assist graduate students with their studies and with the cost of living issues they're dealing with. You mentioned housing. McMaster University is just finishing an $80-million 30-storey building in downtown Hamilton to support post-graduate students. It has become a recruiting issue for the university. When students can't find housing, they look for other opportunities.

How can the government assist in terms of providing housing support outside of the traditional funds and programs that we're talking about? How do we look to other ministries to provide support to ensure those housing issues or affordability issues which you referenced earlier can be addressed in a more wholesome way?

[Justine De Jaegher]

I won't profess to be a housing expert, but I understand that certainly improving the supply of affordable housing in Canada is absolutely crucial. That will help drive prices down and ultimately provide more Canadians, including students, a safe place to live. I would draw particular attention to international students who are here and were sometimes recruited with largely a false promise of a safe place to live while they're pursuing their studies and then end up in rooming houses that are overcrowded and pretty terrible conditions.

I'd look to housing advocates who have spoken to the subject more eloquently than I can. Certainly, increasing the housing supply in Canada has to be a major part of that, including in areas where there are post-secondary institutions.

[Chad Collins, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

With that support, look at providing financial support to post-secondary institutions as it relates to the projects they have under way in the area of housing.

[Justine De Jaegher]

It could, yes, absolutely. Envelope funding for housing could go a long way.

At the end of the day though, ideally we'd like to see a system where institutions are funded adequately to provide all of their operations including their core academic ones, but things like housing as well. We are looking forward to the Canada social transfer review next year.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. De Jaegher and Mr. Lacroix, for your testimony. There were great questions and great answers. I know the analysts will be doing their job to pull this all together for us. You can submit any additional information to the clerk if we haven't covered everything that you'd like to have covered.

We're going to suspend briefly to change panels. If you're online, please stay on. We'll see you in a few minutes.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

We will get started. It's great to have the witnesses here in person and also a full gallery. Welcome to the people who are also witnessing the witnesses.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(i) and the motion adopted by the committee on Tuesday, February 14, 2023, the committee is resuming its study on the Government of Canada's graduate scholarship and post-doctoral fellowship programs.

It's now my pleasure to welcome our witnesses.

As an individual, we have Sarah Laframboise, executive director, Support Our Science. From the Canadian Black Scientists Network, we have Maydianne Andrade, professor. We also have two people from Science and Policy Exchange, Gavin Douglas, co-president; and Julia Messina-Pacheco, vice-president.

Each of the groups being represented will be given a maximum of five minutes for their remarks, after which we'll proceed to the rounds of questions. I'll signal you when we're getting close to time.

At the end of the meeting, we have a request for a project budget that we'll have to go through. We're going to have to leave a few minutes at the end of the meeting so that we're able to do that. We are looking at about 12:55 to wind things up.

For now, we will start off with our first witness, Sarah Laframboise, as an individual.

[Sarah Laframboise, Executive Director, Support Our Science, As an Individual]

Good afternoon. Thank you for having me here today.

My name is Sarah Laframboise, and I am a Ph.D. student studying biochemistry at the University of Ottawa. I'm also executive director of Support Our Science, which is a grassroots organization unified under the mission of increasing funding for graduate students and post-docs in Canada.

I am honoured to be here today and would like to thank this committee for its work in honour of science and research. I had the pleasure of speaking to you on your top talent study almost exactly a year ago. I am thankful to the committee for including our calls for graduate students and post-docs in that report.

It is frustrating, however, that in the year since my appearance there has been no action by our government to solve these problems. During this time, we've had 7,000 scientists and 40 scientific associations sign an open letter. We've had 3,500 signatures on a petition that MP Richard Cannings delivered to the House of Commons. We rallied on Parliament Hill in August. We spoke to MPs, ministers, media and the public about our cause and sent over 2,000 emails to our MPs, but this wasn't enough. Budget 2023 contained no new funding for graduate students and post-docs.

Last week, nearly 10,000 graduate students, post-docs, faculty and supporters walked out of 46 different institutions across Canada. Today, I brought some from the Ottawa crew with me. I'll ask them to stand for a moment.

They should all be doing their research right now. They should be in their labs. I should be in my labs, but we all came here today to show you how critical this is to our community.

Many of these students have helped me launch a national survey investigating graduate students' finances, which painted a bleak but very clear picture of the financial realities of being a graduate student in Canada.

Eighty-six per cent of graduate students have experienced stress and anxiety about their finances. Nearly 40% of students have difficulty paying for necessities like rent and food, and 31% have considered leaving their schooling due to financial concerns. For a country that boasts about our innovation, this is unacceptable.

While other young adults are starting families and investing in their futures, graduate students and post-docs are struggling to just get by.

You will hear many times in these meetings that the scholarships for graduate students and post-docs have not changed in 20 years, but what exactly does this mean for Canada?

This means that every day we are losing our highly trained scientists to the United States and Europe where they don't have to live in poverty and will make two to three times more money than they would here in Canada. This means that our businesses are losing highly skilled workers. This means that every day, we are failing Canadian innovation by defining who can take on the financial challenges of higher education and excluding those who can't. This is a lost potential on a personal level and a national level.

Eleven years ago, I decided to pursue a career in science. As a first-generation student, I self funded my education and took on $100,000 in student debt to be where I am today. When my partner and I hit difficult times early on in my master's degree, I nearly had to drop out of my program when I couldn't make my tuition payments.

I'm 28 years old this year, and I can't buy a home because I don't have an income in the eyes of a bank. I have often worked two to three jobs at a time to subsidize my income. I have no savings, and I rely on my partner's income for stability. I look around, and my peers and family think I'm the smart one, but in reality, I feel like the one left behind.

I am just one example. There are thousands more with their own stories of struggle, inequality and crippling debt. Some have gone as far as living in vans and doing clinical trials just to make ends meet.

Every year that the government doesn't invest in graduate students and post-docs, we are telling the brightest minds in our country that they don't matter, that they don't belong in Canada.

I would like to end my remarks with some clear and strategic recommendations. First, we ask that scholarships and fellowships be increased by 50% to match inflation over the last 20 years, and index these awards to prevent this from happening again in the future. These scholarships set a benchmark for how much we should award the best scholars in Canada.

Second, we ask for a 50% increase in the number of graduate student scholarships and to double the number of post-doc fellowships to allow for more to benefit from these awards directly.

Finally, we call on the government to implement the Bouchard report and increase funding to the tri-councils by 10% per year for the next five years in order to increase grant funding. This will allow increases to graduate student and post-doc pay through their supervisors, leaving a lasting impact on the whole community.

Thank you for your time. I look forward to answering questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you, Ms. Laframboise.

Now we will turn to Ms. Andrade from the Canadian Black Scientists Network for five minutes.

[Professor Maydianne Andrade, President and Co-Founder, Canadian Black Scientists Network]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for inviting me here. I'm a university professor at the University of Toronto. I'm also here as the president and co-founder of the Canadian Black Scientists Network. I represent over 600 Black people in Canada who are pursuing or who have higher degrees in STEMM, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine and health. They work across the country and across sectors.

I'm here because I want to emphasize that supporting and fostering the work of emerging scientists is critical for Canada's innovation ecosystem and that we're “at a breaking point”. This was stated quite clearly in the 2022 report from the advisory panel on the federal research support system, so I'm going to take that as a given: We are at a breaking point.

I will also take as a given the government's repeated emphasis on the importance of science and innovation for addressing the pressing global challenges that are affecting Canada and other countries, and ensuring that we remain competitive on an international scale.

The piece that seems to be missing from all this is the understanding of how research actually gets done on the ground and how innovation arises from research. In fact, the majority of the hands-on research is being done by graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in our system. I can say without hesitation that in the sciences, this is the pattern of every single major research university and lab in the country, every single one. It's graduate students and post-docs who spend most of their time at the bench or in the field. They are the backbone of our science and innovation ecosystem now, and they are the potential for us to be successful in the future.

Once that's understood, it should be clear that investing in infrastructure or in large research consortia is simply not enough. In the end, it's the people who actually do the work who will ensure the success of those investments. When the government asserts that science and innovation is a priority by pointing to things like CFI or CFREF, their words ring hollow. That's because right now, instead of supporting the people who are doing the work within those constructs and supporting their continued excellence, we are pushing them out of science by paying them poverty-level wages.

Our current system is a massive filter. It's a filter that is filtering out people as a function of their finances, not as a function of their excellence and not as a function of the likelihood that they might be the next Canadian Nobel Prize laureate. We are filtering out people who can't take the mental load of living in poverty, those who don't have credit ratings that allow them to take out loans and those who are unable to manage incredibly challenging research agendas while holding down several jobs. We are filtering out mature students who have dependants. We're filtering out anyone whose family can't help support them through this without massive debt.

We know that in Canada, Black families, many families in rural communities, indigenous families and others from marginalized groups simply do not have the financial resources to allow their children to follow this path. We have built a system where, as you heard, more than 40% of graduate students describe their financial situation as tight or struggling. For Black students, that goes up to above 50% of students.

Recently a friend said to me, “I know you're passionate about this.” I went to the Support Our Science march. It was one of only two I've been to in 53 years, so I'm not a regular demonstrator. My friend asked, “What would you say to a struggling single mother in rural Canada who asks why their taxes should pay the salary of someone doing something that they couldn't dream of doing?” I would say, “Do you want your children to be able to pursue that if they have talent, in 2023 in Canada, regardless of your financial situation?”

That 's not just for that child. That's for the benefit of Canada. Novelty and innovation live in every community. I was born in Jamaica. My family immigrated here when I was little, about two. I was fortunate in that I knew that my parents supported my education. When I discovered a passion for biology, I knew they would have gone into debt to help me get through graduate school, but I was fortunate in that I got a large fellowship from NSERC. It was the largest one they offered at the time. It was just a little over $21,000 31 years ago. A master's student starting now makes $17,500. That's less than I made 31 years ago.

Even with that fellowship, when I finished my Ph.D. at Cornell and I thought I'd like to start a family, I had a choice: If I wanted to do a post-doc and have a family, I had to stay in the United States, because Canada would not compensate me in a way that would allow me to start a family. I was fortunate that I was hired at U of T and didn't have to make that choice, but a lot of people do. They leave Canada. We are losing talent by the bucketload under the current system.

That's why the Canadian Black Scientists Network joins with our colleagues. As you just heard, we're all in alignment, actually, with the requests and demands in the Bouchard report.

We need to have an increase in the support for our emerging scientists.

The government's own advisory panel said the “current support for graduate students—the researchers of tomorrow—is at a breaking point”, which is where I started.

As we have this conversation, it's critical to centre the knowledge that this breaking point is the breaking point for our science and innovation ecosystem. Join us in making sure we can reverse that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Douglas or Ms. Messina-Pacheco from Science and Policy Exchange, the floor is yours for five minutes.

[Julia Messina-Pacheco, Vice-President, Science and Policy Exchange]

Thank you, honourable Chair and esteemed committee members, for the opportunity to speak today.

My name is Julia Messina-Pacheco.

My colleague, Dr. Douglas, and I are here today representing Science and Policy Exchange. It is a non-profit advocacy group run by graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in Montreal.

Our aim is to foster the voices of the next generation of researchers in evidence-based decision-making at the interface of science and policy. I am also speaking to you today as a Ph.D. candidate who has dedicated 12 years to pursuing post-secondary education. Of those 12 years, I have spent seven as a graduate student. That is seven years that I, along with the vast majority of graduate students in Canada, have been under-supported and forced to make difficult financial compromises.

My own research focuses on pancreatic cancer. It is a devastating disease that affects thousands of Canadians and their families every year. I have devoted years of hard work to studying this disease because I am passionate about improving patient outcomes, and I am also driven by a genuine love for science. However, this passion and the pursuit of knowledge have left me in a situation where I struggle to afford necessities such as rent, groceries and the ability to start a family.

It takes many years to earn a master's or doctoral degree, and the process is much more like a job than traditional schooling. The support provided through stipends and fellowships should offset the cost of living and enable us to focus on the research that Canada depends on. It is essential to recognize that science thrives because of the unwavering commitment and the tireless efforts of graduate students and of post-doctoral researchers. They form the backbone of Canadian discovery, innovation and economic growth. However, federal scholarships and fellowships have remained stagnant for two decades. These funding mechanisms have failed to keep up with the 48% inflation and the 38% increase in tuition costs during that time.

The consequences of this inadequate funding are severe. Federal scholarships hold significant prestige and serve as benchmarks for what universities consider reasonable minimum stipends. Unfortunately, these benchmarks for master's and doctoral students fall below the poverty line.

According to a recent report published by the Institute for Research and Socioeconomic Information, the minimum amount required for a single person in Montreal to live with dignity is $32,535. After tuition, university fees and insurance, my doctoral funding leaves me with only $20,000 per year to live on.

Inadequate funding also compels graduate students and post-docs to seek better financial opportunities in the U.S., in Europe, or elsewhere, where they are paid stipends that reflect their merit and that adequately cover the cost of living. Canada is falling behind its global counterparts in retaining talent. If Canada genuinely values scientists, it must ensure that pursuing a Ph.D. is a period of skill development and a stepping stone to greater achievements and not something to financially recover from.

Dr. Douglas will now outline our specific recommendations.

[Gavin Douglas, Co-President, Science and Policy Exchange]

Thank you.

My colleague has just highlighted the key issue: Canadian graduate and post-doctoral awards have not been adequately corrected for inflation since 2003, as we all know.

An increase in tri-agency graduate scholarships and in post-doctoral fellowships is crucially needed to adjust for the 48% inflation that has occurred over this period. Please note we specify that a distinction be made for doctoral awards, as we recommend that PGS D awards be increased to $35,000 to align with the current value of the more prestigious CGS D awards. In addition to this increase in monetary value, an increase in the total number of awards is needed.

Canada’s population of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows has vastly outpaced the number of awards provided. To help address this issue, we recommend that the number of tri-agency graduate student scholarships be increased by 50% and that the number of post-doctoral fellowships be doubled. We appreciate that federal research funding agencies cannot allocate funds they do not possess. Therefore, in line with recommendations from fellow witnesses, and the recent “Report of the Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System”, we strongly recommend that tri-agency funding be increased by 10% every year for five years with funding specifically allocated for graduate student stipends and post-doctoral fellow salaries.

These changes are needed to ensure that Canadians with high research potential are encouraged to receive advanced training and ultimately to explore the job market here in Canada instead of moving abroad where they may be more appropriately compensated.

Thank you for the invitation to speak today. We would be very happy to answer any questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you, witnesses.

We're right on time, but I'm looking at the clock and we have about 32 minutes for our questioning rounds. What I'm going to propose is that we have the first round at five minutes each and then trim off some time on the second round as well, so that we can get in at five to the hour, as I said at the beginning.

Could we start off with Mr. Mazier, please.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for coming out today. This is really good.

My first questions are for Science and Policy Exchange. I'm going to ask a series of yes-or-no questions. Hopefully, you can answer accordingly.

Can you confirm that your organization submitted a pre-budget consultation in 2018 calling on the Liberal government to increase graduate and post-doctoral awards, yes or no?

[Gavin Douglas]

Yes.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Did the government act on this request?

[Gavin Douglas]

No.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Can you confirm that your organization submitted a similar 2020 pre-budget consultation calling on the Liberal government to increase the value of student post-doctoral awards?

[Gavin Douglas]

Yes.