Science and Research Committee on June 15th, 2023

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

That's great. Thank you.

We'll suspend for a very brief sound check, and then we'll get into Ms. Muralidharan's presentation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you for the sound check.

We'll start with a presentation from the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars.

Ms. Muralidharan, post-doctoral fellow, you have five minutes. Go ahead, please.

[Dr. Padmapriya Muralidharan, Postdoctoral Fellow, Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the members of the committee for the invitation.

I respectfully acknowledge that I'm speaking from the unceded territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen, Qayqayt and Tsawwassen nations.

I'm a post-doctoral researcher at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, and I'm the chair of the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars—CAPS or ACSP.

CAPS-ACSP is a non-profit professional association that advocates on behalf of Canadian post-doctoral scholars for a wide range of career paths. The mandate of CAPS-ACSP is to improve the lives, training and work experience of all Canadian post-docs. CAPS strongly believes in the value of advocacy work for Canadian post-docs, and we believe that a strong profession requires an effective regulator as well as an active professional association.

Who are post-docs? I am a post-doc, so who am I? I completed my Ph.D., my doctoral studies, in Australia. I went ahead for my first post-doctoral research in the U.S., and then I moved on to Canada.

We are individuals who continue to stay in the academic field to enhance our skill set following our doctoral degree. We are mostly very highly qualified, and there are about 10,000 of us across Canada. We are working in about 60 institutions, as confirmed in one of the reports by CAPS in 2018.

Based on our recent national post-doctoral survey in 2020, we had responses from over 1,000 post-docs, the majority of whom were current post-docs at that point in time. The rest of them were former post-docs. The survey showed that a majority of the respondents, about 88.5% of them, were post-docs who worked in institutions in Canada, whereas the remaining ones worked abroad. We had a high number of respondents: about 35% from Ontario, followed by Alberta, B.C. and Quebec.

There are some interesting findings or numbers that we could point out from our survey. We found that a majority of the post-doc respondents belonged to the field of life sciences. The second-highest field was engineering, and last were the humanities. As we heard in some of the earlier conversations, the major source of funding for a majority of the post-docs was a supervisor's grant—about 50% of them—followed by the NSERC fellowships at around 10%, CIHR or SSHRC fellowships at less than 5%, and Mitacs fellowships of about 5% to 8%.

Most of our post-docs are an average of 33 years old. About 62% are married, and there are almost equal numbers of male and female post-docs in the field. The median hours of work for us are about 45 hours, and the median salary for the majority is $51,000 or so. About 25% of post-docs earn less than $45K.

Currently, the tri-council fellowships are valued at $40,000, plus a $5,000 research allowance for three years. The value of the awards should be increased by 48% to address inflation, since we have not had any changes for the past 20 years. Hopefully, the new projected value would be $60,000.

Why do we need support?

The current funding is unsustainable. Post-docs and grad students are key players in the research teams in all the research labs and the universities. We are a great support for Canadian research and innovation, but the amount of funding and the numbers of fellowships are not enough to support our careers. This is why we need increased support from the federal government. This does not just mean increased funding. It would also mean increased value for the funds and also an increase in the numbers for funding or fellowships offered to post-docs.

A lot of post-docs find it difficult to carry on their normal life, as the current salaries affect their lifestyles. There's a lot of brain drain happening, because many post-docs have left Canada. They could not afford to live or work here. If we want future Canadian research to be internationally competitive, we need to pay them enough to match the other G7 countries. There should be more investments made in academia and in industrial partnerships.

There is another key item recently being commonly talked about: Post-docs do not have enough health benefits, especially when they get an external award, throughout most of the major Canadian universities. That is something—

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

I'm sorry. I have to cut you off there. We are on a very tight schedule.

[Dr. Padmapriya Muralidharan]

Sure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

We're actually going to have to trim the question time to four minutes, four minutes, two minutes and two minutes in order to arrive on time.

Thank you for your testimony. Maybe the rest of it can be worked into the question round.

We will start with Mr. Lobb for four minutes, please.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Chantel, welcome to the committee. As part of your job, do you receive benefits, such as health benefits and so forth, under the McMaster University benefit program?

[Chantel Millar]

I do.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

That's good. In the department, do you get a chance to meet with the administration that takes care of the graduate study program, or is it basically computer interaction?

[Chantel Millar]

I know some of the administrative staff. I know where their room is in the engineering building for the mechanical engineering department.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

When you find out that you're going to be receiving a financial grant for your research, is there a process where you're involved, or is it just basically, “Here's your cash. Go do your study”?

[Chantel Millar]

An email is sent out just to give an overview of the dates and the amounts that will be sent to us.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

I would think that the area you described would be an area of interest to many large corporations and even small venture capital corporations—TC Energy, Enbridge and list goes on and on for Canadian companies. I'm wondering if they have regular meetings with folks like you to say, “Hey, we'd love to help fund some of your research so that you'll come and work for us when you're done your graduate studies and we'll pay you a big salary.” Do you know if that ever happens?

[Chantel Millar]

For my particular research group, there are industry partners on the project. In terms of funding amounts, that would go to the research group itself rather than to the grad students. It would go to the research group, and then our supervisor would kind of allocate those funds to the actual laboratory for equipment, or to grad students for funding. I know there are examples where these companies will pay a grad student, or pay one of their employees to then enter grad school, so they do get funding from that company as well as from grad studies.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

I have one thing just to sum up. I think we've heard this enough by now, and certainly you've made a good description: There are too many gatekeepers at these universities. If Fortis wants to pay you $40,000 a year plus the university grant to get you to $60,000 or $70,000, you should just get it directly. There doesn't need to be a supervisor and a gatekeeper skimming 50% off just to tell you that you can do your research.

[Chantel Millar]

Yes. I think streamlining some of the funding would be useful.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

I think so.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

If you're finished, Mr. Lobb, that's a good break point. Thank you for being succinct in your questioning.

It's over to Mr. Collins for four minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the witnesses for their attendance this morning.

I'll start with you, Ms. Muralidharan. We have had the Support Our Science group in front of us here a couple of times. I think they had two representatives. They gave very specific recommendations related to increasing the value of graduate scholarships by 50% and indexing them to inflation, increasing the number of grad scholarships by 50%, and increasing post-doctoral fellowships by 100%. They gave very specific recommendations.

Along the same lines and themes that they presented, you talked about the need for increased support. Do you have specific recommendations on what those numbers should look like and what that level of support should look like in relation to government support?

[Dr. Padmapriya Muralidharan]

Sure. At the moment, federal funding or fellowships are valued at just $40,000. That's very little for a post-doc like me who's living in an expensive city like Vancouver. We cannot live on just $45,000. It should start with a base value of at least $60,000. That's the recommendation, and hopefully it's topped up more.

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

In terms of the number of those recipients, have you given thought to that in terms of the level of support in that regard?

[Dr. Padmapriya Muralidharan]

Yes. We definitely want it to be much higher. I can give you the number. We are indexing or we are trying to say that we need at least 150 more new awards per category. That would help a lot of post-docs.

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

Thanks very much.

Mr. Chair, I will switch gears and ask Chantel a question.

Chantel, you've raised a number of issues as they relate to affordability and inflation and the impact these have on those who are continuing their education and research in our country. One of the areas is housing. You're studying in Hamilton. I know McMaster is building a new facility in downtown Hamilton for $100 million. I think it's a 30-storey building that will provide residences for 600 postgraduate students.

It's about supports like that. There are common themes here. You've given recommendations in terms of increasing the levels of support for graduate students, the value of the scholarships and the number of scholarships. We just heard that previous answer from the other witness. Those are very common themes.

One thing I've tried to ask witnesses through the study is, are there other areas where the government can provide support? Housing is one of those areas. I'll point again to McMaster's investment downtown. Are there other areas where we can provide support to ease the burden of the costs everyone has provided to the committee, in order to ensure your studies and the research you do have an easier path to go down...knowing there are other supports beyond the scholarships, fellowships and grant values that have been referenced and have been a common theme at the committee?

I have about 30 seconds left.

[Chantel Millar]

Specifically, for grad student housing, making the housing competitive at market value is not good enough. I think it should be competitive at the value at which students are getting paid, because, even if it's good in terms of the market, students still can't afford something that expensive.