I'd like to thank the committee for this opportunity to hear the views of the members of the Alliance of Canadian Comprehensive Research Universities, otherwise known as ACCRU.
Our alliance represents 46 of 92—or 50%—of Canada's universities. Our members are small and mid-sized universities representing all 10 provinces and the Yukon.
While there is considerable diversity in our member institutions, some characteristics include world-class expertise in disciplines that are often closely aligned with the economic, social and environmental priorities in their regions. They provide a gateway to Canada's learners to access post-secondary education in their region and language of choice. They provide transformational training opportunities, often at the undergraduate level. They have strong ties to their regions, with established relationships with industry, community and indigenous partners. Several are quite new. They have small faculty complements, limited research infrastructure and under-resourced research administration teams.
We applaud this committee's initiative and hope that it sheds light on some of the historical and current realities of federal research funding distribution in Canada.
From our extensive analysis, key metrics from funding competition data show that the current distribution is heavily concentrated in institutions located in Canada's largest urban centres. For example, 79% of all federal funding goes to 15 of Canada's universities that represent 52% of Canadian researchers and 59% of grad students. Twenty per cent of the most financed researchers in Canada receive 77% of all funding, and the top 1% of them receive 23%.
Despite our members representing 50% of Canada's universities, we receive 12% of SSHRC's funding, 9% of NSERC's, 2% of CIHR's and 4.5% of CFI's. Canada has been aware of these inequities since 2001, and despite the recommendations in the 2002 study by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology to address the problem, things have gotten worse.
Research in Canada is not limited to a couple of postal codes. For example, our researchers are undertaking studies on a broad range of Canada's most pressing priorities in health and in natural and social sciences. These include discoveries in food security, wildfire mitigation, emergency management, rural health, homelessness, the toxic drug crisis, advancements in our resource sectors and more.
These universities punch above their weight in terms of ROI in research. A limited amount of funding can be transformational for them. They're also vulnerable to swings in research funding that would be inconsequential to some larger institutions.
We support many of the recommendations of the Bouchard report for additional funding to the councils; however, we strongly believe that this funding must be done in a much more equitable way. Currently, the distribution of funding in Canada is often biased because it's based on previous success rates: Success begets success. This limits the return on investment in research, known as the Matthew effect, and it widens the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Changes to this distribution model are long overdue. Special programs are often launched in ways that preclude participation by small and mid-sized universities. One of the impacts is that 90% of funding that goes to student research is embedded in investigator-driven grants. Until funding support is bolstered for students in a way that's not tied to success and tri-agency funding, many of Canada's students will not have access to the funding they need to conduct research training unless they relocate to institutions with higher allocations.
Direct costs must be borne by institutions in order to administer research funding. The amount of money you get through the research support fund is also based on your previous success in tri-agency funding. This leads to small and medium-sized institutions having a very difficult time keeping up with the growing number of compliance requirements that are happening at universities, the most recent being research security.
As your committee undertakes this important work, we encourage you to ask, is the distribution of federal funding addressing the priorities and needs of all Canadians? Is it limiting our competitiveness and innovation potential? Is it meeting the training needs of all of our Canadian learners?
Canada does have the potential to leverage its considerable research talent to lead this critically important research, but this will be possible only if we recognize that we've designed a system that privileges some and disproportionately limits others.
If left unchecked, this gap will continue to widen and limit our research excellence.