Science and Research Committee on April 18th, 2024

[Céline Poncelin de Raucourt]

For the past year and a half, I believe, we have had a major initiative for all institutions in the Université du Québec network. It's called the post-secondary student mental health initiative.

By pooling our expertise, we created this initiative, which received funding from Quebec's ministries of health and social services and advanced education to promote student mental health. This initiative has brought together resources for mental health workers who support students, as well as a range of resources that are offered directly to students within our network.

The initiative was so successful that both provincial departments asked us to serve not only the Université du Québec community, but also all universities in Quebec, as well as CEGEPs and colleges. That's one example.

Unfortunately, this kind of initiative is too new for us to be able to look at its impact on mental health in the way you're asking me to.

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

How do you ensure that the utilization of federal funding at the Université du Québec maximizes return on investment, particularly in terms of research output and educational quality? What are some of the key performance indicators that you used to evaluate the effectiveness of these funded projects?

[Céline Poncelin de Raucourt]

Each institution has a whole support ecosystem for innovation, knowledge transfer and knowledge mobilization.

There's obviously the whole issue of the patents and start-ups that come out of this research. Then there are social innovations, which often get less attention but are just as important. In fact, we are starting to improve the system used to evaluate these innovations.

Earlier, I talked about research being done with partners which, as a matter of principle, does not necessarily generate patents or other things, but rather creates relationships between industries or non-profit organizations and our researchers. Research partnerships are designed to have a concrete and direct impact on partners who have expressed a need. That research is done to answer specific questions.

The number of research partnerships can also be an indicator of the impact of investments made in research in terms of improving living conditions in Canadian communities.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you very much.

Now it's over to Helena Jaczek for five minutes.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I would like to start off by thanking our witness for coming today and giving their presentations.

Our study is looking at the distribution of federal funding amongst Canada's post-secondary institutions. I think we've all agreed that the pie needs to be expanded, and this is why we're so pleased that our government has introduced the budget, which of course will be subject to a confidence vote, so we are not going to take anything for granted. However, the proposal obviously is to increase the pie in terms of research dollars.

I want to concentrate on practical solutions as to how this amount of funding should be distributed. One of the suggestions that I've heard from a researcher was that when the tri-council looks at applications for grants, those applications be blinded. In other words, there is no sign that an application is from a U15 institution or any other; that it isn't necessarily part of the application that the previous publications of a particular professor focused on.

What do you think about the possibility of blinding the review panel to the actual institution that is applying?

Can we go to Professor Larivière first, please?

[Dr. Vincent Larivière]

Thank you for your question.

The literature clearly shows that putting less emphasis on the identity of applicants leads to greater equality in outcomes. So the answer to your question is yes, we should be looking at that. Canada is doing very well, by the way. According to a study by Holly Witteman, a professor at Laval University, when the Canadian Institutes of Health Research decided to reduce the importance of résumés during the assessment of applications and give more weight to the actual project, there was no more gender inequality in the success rates. One could surmise that this will also reduce the weighted advantage of the more prestigious universities compared to the others.

I am therefore entirely in favour of anonymizing projects as much as possible, or, in the case of funding for professors, giving more weight to projects and less to applicants' résumés.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Ms. Poncelin de Raucourt, what is your take on this?

[Céline Poncelin de Raucourt]

My opinion is very much in line with what Mr. Larivière was saying, that these are things that should absolutely be looked at. We will have to go further and rethink the criteria used to determine what constitutes a high quality project. Sometimes, a project description must contain a lot of details or conceptual evidence on the environment in which the researcher operates. However, that places too much weight on the institution's infrastructure, when it is not always related to the quality of the project that the researcher can carry out. These are things that also need to be reviewed.

One solution would be to ask a researcher, for example, to talk about their five publications that are most relevant to the project, rather than gathering an infinite number of pages of publications that aren't relevant. It would also be much less cumbersome for the teams to manage. There are a number of potential solutions to explore in what is also called redefining the criteria of excellence.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Thank you very much.

At our last meeting, we did have a suggestion from the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies that perhaps the allocation—again talking about redistribution, practical suggestions—should be based on, in fact, the number of students in that institution. Do you feel that might be helpful as well?

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Very briefly, please.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

This is for Dr. Larivière.

[Dr. Vincent Larivière]

Very briefly, it would be something to explore. I think the key word here is “experimental”. Funding agencies need to be ready to experiment with new ways of allocating funding. We can see this trend internationally. In fact, the Europeans and the Swiss National Science Foundation often do this. There is even talk of randomizing funding, i.e., handing out some of the funding randomly, because at the moment, the peer review system is recognized the world over as being imperfect.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

That's great. We are over, but thanks for getting that in.

Mr. Blanchette-Joncas, you have two and a half minutes.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My question is for Ms. Poncelin de Raucourt.

In your presentation, you talked about the vicious cycle that the current funding system creates.

Can you provide us with more details?

[Céline Poncelin de Raucourt]

Yes, absolutely. In our university network, concentration has a direct impact on our institutions' developmental capacity, on their ability to attract graduate students and, as a result, on funding for their operations budgets. Indeed, a large part of the funding used for university operations is contingent on student numbers.

As a result, there is less intake capacity, in particular because of the quota system for graduate student scholarships, which has a direct impact on a university's development. As I said earlier, less funding for research means fewer funded researchers; fewer funded researchers means fewer graduate students; fewer graduate students means a smaller operations budget; a smaller operations budget means fewer professors and fewer teams to support them.

That's the vicious cycle I was talking about earlier.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you.

I will now turn to Mr. Larivière.

In your opinion, is the allocation of research funding in Canada currently affected by the “Matthew effect”? Scientists from the top institutions of higher learning say that the allocation mechanism is not creating any problems. They receive nearly 80% of the funding and obviously want to maintain their position of dominance in research and in technological innovation.

[Dr. Vincent Larivière]

Yes, there is a “Matthew effect”. That basically means that the more visibility you have in the scientific field, the more funding you receive and the easier it becomes to receive more funding. It turns out that the more money you have, the more funding you get.

This is not unique to Canada, though. We are seeing this play out virtually everywhere, as I mentioned earlier. On that note, I would really like us to try different ways of reintroducing greater fairness into the system so that we don't lose discoveries that could have been made were it not for a lack of resources.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Larivière, since we are talking about discoveries, I would point out that according to some researchers, the current system does not even provide funding for cutting-edge research. I would like to know what you think about that.

[Dr. Vincent Larivière]

It is true that our peer review system is currently regarded as very conservative, which means it is quite likely that no funding will be granted for ideas that are slightly more outside of the box.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Would you say that Canada is more focused on [Technical difficulty—Editor ] than on discoveries that might warrant a Nobel Prize, for example?

[Dr. Vincent Larivière]

That would be speculation on my part. That said, it is clear that some work is not being done because of a lack of funding.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you.

Mr. Cannings, you have two and a half minutes.

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

Thank you.

I'm going to turn to Dr. Poncelin de Raucourt again.

The day before yesterday, in the budget, there was an announcement about a new advisory council on science and innovation that would be responsible for a national strategy to guide priority setting and to increase the impact of federal investments in research.

If you were on that council, what would be your first bit of advice to the government on how to best change our funding system for science and research in Canada?

[Céline Poncelin de Raucourt]

If I were on that council, it would be because they heard us today.

One of the recommendations we made in the brief we will be submitting is that a committee of this kind should take into account the diversity of Canada's research ecosystem. That way, institutions located in various regions or with a different approach could be represented within those committees and have their voices heard. That would be the first bit of good news.

A second recommendation would be to ensure adequate funding for the entire research ecosystem. It's something we've been talking about here for a while. That is how we will be able to address the issues, by allowing all the regions and different approaches to have a voice. I think that's the innovative quality that Canada's research ecosystem will have.

This would ensure fair distribution and fund the discoveries of a greater number of researchers so that we can have a system that is as innovative and as agile as possible.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

You have 30 seconds.