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—