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.