Thank you.
Greetings. I want to thank the committee for inviting me as a representative of the Post-secondary Student Homeless/Housing Research Network. I would also like to add in response to my colleagues that I actually was a CAGS recipient of the Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2014, so thank you.
I'm an associate professor at UNB in Saint John. I'm known as a lived experience scholar. I have been in recovery from addictions and episodic homelessness for about 28 years. Most of my work focuses on these areas, and on finding ways to incorporate lived experience in qualitative research, and also seeing students' or other potential researchers' life courses as evidence of skills and qualifications deserving of recognition and funding. I will return to this later.
Since 2016 we have been studying post-secondary student homelessness. The work began as surveys at sites across Canada. In 2021, our network, anchored at UNB in Saint John, expanded to eight sites and was funded by Making the Shift Inc., part of the Networks of Centres of Excellence of Canada. The research asks what students, faculty, administrators and researchers think the role of institutions and government should be in assisting them with housing and other costs.
One might ask how research on student housing bears on innovations in the funding of research in Canada. The housing piece is a key ingredient for student success at all levels of the post-secondary experience. I agree with the comments made by Dr. Vaugeois on March 21 and many others about what I would call implicit biases toward funding previously funded scholars and institutions. They do lead to overt disparities, great frustration and demoralization among researchers, especially in smaller settings. I am going to address how rethinking housing supports will support researchers and, hence, research.
Five per cent of Canada's 2.2 million post-secondary students live in some form of homelessness. That's close to 110,000 students every day. Sixty-four per cent of them allocate more than 30% of their income to housing. Fifty per cent suffer mental health issues, and at some of our smaller sites in our research close to 70% of students would leave school if faced with that hardship and over 30% had done so in the past.
Equity-denied groups were overrepresented in the data. Close to 80% of post-secondary students are youths 17 to 29. The other 20% or so are older, many returning students in graduate programs seeking to reinvent themselves through research practices towards purposeful lives in a changing economy. Many have families and housing pressures and many live in housing precarity through this reinvention.
Regional colleges and polytechnics may be smaller than large urban universities, but they play instrumental roles in maintaining workforces and contributing to practical research. So when we're funding research, or tuition, we are funding student life courses that are more complicated than traditionally thought of, more than the research, more than the ideas. The research is intertwined in these complex life courses. It's time to consider what more the government can do to support this important piece, the housing piece.
Supporting student housing will directly lead to the well-being of students, encourage long-term research tracks, and increase graduate and post-graduate attendance. An overwhelming majority of students and other respondents in our work feel it is incumbent on the federal government to help with this urgent part of their education, and they balk at applying to graduate programs because of this cost factor.
On two of my research projects this year I have had gifted students who found the pressure of maintaining their housing and their schooling too difficult and in the midst of the research had to take leave from their research positions. I believe in anecdotal evidence. My colleagues will tell you how common housing-related precarities are among our research assistants and the effect it has on our research. Be it AI or the cost of living, post-secondary is facing several existential threats. The future of research in Canada is not simply about funding research, but about funding the post-secondary experience better to guarantee basic needs and encourage potential researchers to stay in school. Our respondents agree that tempering the housing piece itself will yield long-term benefits to post-secondary and to Canadian research literacy in the future.
I have more that I would like to address perhaps in the question period. I would like to mention as well, based on my own experience, the support I got from Concordia University as a person with unconventional.... I left school when I was in the middle of a Ph.D. in the late 1980s and had a massive gap in my experience. I finally got into a program where they valued lived experience at Concordia and the results—CAGS is witness to this—were a really interesting form of research.
One of the things our respondents and our entire network believes in is that the government must get involved in figuring out ways to fund and to value non-academic and lived experiences similarly to the ways we value track records.
Thank you very much.