Science and Research Committee on April 18th, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you.

We aren't quite at the top of the hour.

I do have one question.

Dr. McMartin, you mentioned mental health and the work going on in Lethbridge. I noticed that your university hadn't been part of the Canadian Brain Research Strategy or Brain Canada. I wonder about the distribution of funding impacting joining networks like that in Canada that might be able to help further the work you're doing.

[Dr. Dena McMartin]

That's a really important question. We partner at the individual faculty member level, so we do have partnerships with the prairie hub of Brain Canada.

I will be frank. The funding that the federal government announced this week is very welcome. These are important investments in ensuring that there is support for mental health for students, staff and faculty.

This is a universal challenge across the country. This isn't just us. Students are becoming the young adults who will lead the country in the future. We want to make sure that they have the best chance to do that as stable, resilient citizens.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you, that's tremendous. I really appreciate your thoughts on that.

Thank you to Dr. Alice Aiken and to Dr. Dena McMartin for your contributions this morning and your participation in the study on the distribution of government funding among Canada's post-secondary institutions.

If there is additional information you would like to share, please direct that to the clerk, and the analysts can use that as they prepare the report for us.

We will suspend for a minute or two while we go on to our next round.

Thank you to the members for some great questions this morning.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

We'll get started on the second part of our meeting. Welcome back.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(i) and the motions adopted by the committee on Thursday, January 30 and Thursday, February 15, 2024, the committee resumes its study of the distribution of federal government funding among Canada's post-secondary institutions.

It's now my pleasure to welcome, as an individual, Vincent Larivière, professor, Université de Montréal.

We also have Céline Poncelin de Raucourt from the Université du Quebec, vice-president, teaching and research, via video conference.

We will start with five minutes from Monsieur Larivière.

Go ahead, please.

[Dr. Vincent Larivière, Professor, University of Montreal, As an Individual]

Thank you very much for your invitation to testify on the concentration of research funding, a rather important issue.

My name is Vincent Larivière. I am a professor of information sciences at the Université de Montréal and the UNESCO Chair in Open Science.

I am not here representing the Université de Montréal. Rather, I am here as an expert who has been studying the Canadian research system and, more specifically, the organization of funding for two decades.

The first thing to mention is that concentration of research funding is seen in almost all countries. It's a bit like a natural dynamic of research systems. We see everywhere that a minority of individuals or institutions receive most of the funding. I should also mention that funding in Canada is a little less concentrated than in other countries. This is illustrated by the fact that the success rates of scientists who apply for funding from Canadian granting agencies are generally a little higher than what we see, for example, in the United States, where funding is extremely concentrated. This is particularly true in the natural sciences and engineering sectors, where we have a rather deconcentrated approach in Canada.

To summarize, there are two approaches to research funding.

The first approach focuses on excellence. Large amounts of money, large grants, are given to a few organizations and individuals.

The other approach focuses more on discovery. More people receive funding, but the amounts provided are smaller.

The first approach assumes that giving a lot of money to a few people will lead to economies of scale in the system, slightly more efficient knowledge production and, therefore, more collective benefits. An analogy can be drawn with the industrial context where producing a lot of cars will lead to lower production costs per car.

The second approach rather assumes that concentrating funding by giving a lot of money to individuals or organizations that already have a lot of money will lead to lower marginal productivity. We end up with what economists call diminishing returns.

This is an important public policy issue. A lot of work has been done to determine whether one of the two approaches actually provides more collective benefits and whether research should, therefore, be concentrated or deconcentrated.

However, across Canada, the data shows that the concentration of research funds does not create economies of scale, but that it leads to diminishing returns, which means that every scientific article published costs more. That's what we see in Canada and that's what we see in the syntheses that have been done globally. So we know quite a bit about the effects of the concentration of research funding in Canada and in the rest of the world.

I must say that I am pleased to note the changes to student funding in the last budget. The government came to its senses with one-time amounts, not “supergrants” that concentrate funding.

That brings me to the concentration of funding for institutions, about which we know much less. We know that funding for institutions is concentrated. We know that five institutions collectively receive more than 45% of the total funding provided by the three federal councils. We also know that institutions that are members of the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities collectively receive about 80% of the funding in Canada. That has been stable for about 20 years. However, we don't really know whether there are diminishing returns. So over the past few weeks, my team and I have been looking for new data on the effects of the concentration of funding for institutions.

Therefore, I did an original analysis that looks at all of the funding provided to Canadian universities by the three federal councils—the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council—and also looks at all of the scientific production, meaning the scientific papers published by the researchers at those universities. I wanted to see if there were indeed economies of scale, or if there were diminishing returns.

However, we can see that, just like the concentration of funding for individual researchers, the concentration of funding for institutions leads to diminishing returns. We see it in two out of three areas—in natural sciences, with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and in medicine, with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. In universities that receive a lot of funding, the cost of research is much higher than in universities that receive less funding. So there is no economy of scale in concentrating university funding. Instead, we are seeing diminishing returns.

The argument could obviously be made that the work is of higher quality in the major funded universities. However, when you take into account the quality of the work, as well, you also see the same kind of diminishing returns. In other words, higher quality would not explain the higher cost of research.

I will quickly conclude by saying that, in terms of public policy, the goal is not to suggest taking money from well-funded universities and giving it to less funded universities, as that would generate the same kind of diminishing returns. That's an inherent feature of the system. Rather, it is a matter of better understanding the level of interinstitutional inequality that makes it possible to generate the most collective benefits. If we know that there will be inequality, it's about knowing what level, acceptable for university institutions and for the system, would make it possible to collectively produce more knowledge.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you.

I'm sorry, but we are over the time. I did want to catch the last part of your thoughts there. I think if your report is available to us in the next 30 days, maybe we could include that in our deliberations of the report that we'll be looking at through our analysts.

[Dr. Vincent Larivière]

It will be.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you very much. If you could send that to the clerk, that would be very helpful.

Now we will go to Université du Québec and Céline Poncelin de Raucourt for five minutes.

Go ahead, please.

[Céline Poncelin de Raucourt, Vice-President, Teaching and Research, Université du Québec]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Honourable members, thank you for inviting us to participate in this very important work.

The institutions of the Université du Québec are booming, and the research community is calling for a number of niches of excellence in strategic areas for Canada. If we look only at the environmental issue, our research teams have developed niches of internationally recognized expertise—for example, on the role of the oceans in climate change, on clean technologies, on green energy or on the sustainable development of natural resources. More specifically, we are working to reduce flood risks, increase wildfire resilience, accelerate circular economy strategies or prevent and manage health issues related to pollution or environmental degradation. These successes were not achieved entirely thanks to the funding system, but despite allocation arrangements that are often unfavourable to our researchers.

As Mr. Larivière just mentioned, the phenomenon of concentrating research funding is well known. Institutionally, funding is focused on U15 member institutions, the vast majority of which have a faculty of medicine and are located in large urban centres. Those institutions receive nearly 80% of the funding, even though they have 59% of the graduate student population and barely half of the faculty. At the individual level, as well, about 80% of research funding goes to 20% of the most funded researchers. This means that 80% of the university community barely share 20% of the financial pie.

This is not by accident, but because of systemic biases that favour larger institutions with a faculty of medicine. The logic of this system is simple: Past grants attract future grants. From scholarships to major grant programs to Canada research chairs, the entire system is designed to reward institutions and researchers less for the potential of their research program for society than for the funding they have already received.

We have to break that vicious cycle. The main reason is that it is a poor strategy to allocate public funds to a limited number of institutions or researchers. Research, as was just mentioned, has shown that the concentration of funding produces diminishing returns when measured by the number of articles or the number of citations. After a certain threshold, investments no longer have the desired production effect.

The real key to the research community's productivity is not the amount that each individual receives, but rather the number of individuals at work. Funding more researchers will increase the system's productivity. In other words, putting all our eggs in one basket reduces the chances of innovation in Canadian research, especially since low rates associated with a high concentration of funds encourage a certain amount of conservatism in the university community.

Concentration of funds is not only an ill-advised strategy to support discovery, but it is also a public policy that is problematic in terms of economic development, as small and medium-sized institutions are woven into the economic and social fabric of their communities. They train a highly skilled workforce, and their research focuses on their region's environment, populations and social challenges. Those institutions are currently disadvantaged by the federal funding system.

A similar observation can be made about the country's francophone communities. Since 2004, the share of total research funding granted by the federal government to francophone institutions has been declining. Francophone researchers now receive a percentage of the funding that is smaller than their demographic weight. For Canada to maintain the vitality of all of its communities, it is imperative that more funding be provided to those institutions.

Of course, we have embraced the recommendations of the Bouchard report to substantially increase research funding in Canada, and we applaud this week's budget announcements to increase the number and value of scholarships. This decision responds to representations that have been made for many years by all university stakeholders and by your own committee. Ultimately, that increase will ensure a better future for the next generation of Canadian researchers.

However, injecting more money into the system will not make it more functional if the rules governing it are not also changed. In order to break the vicious cycle in which the Canadian research community finds itself, funding must be distributed more equitably. To that end, we have made a number of recommendations in our brief.

For example, we recommend that: the tri-council budget increase take into account the proportion of researchers and graduate students in the disciplines they cover; budget increases enable researchers to increase the value of the grants they give to students through their own research grants; and the government introduce a minimum threshold of chairs per institution.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you very much. For any other recommendations we don't get to, you can support us by sending them in writing. That would be great.

Now we'll go to our questions, starting off with Michelle Rempel Garner for six minutes.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

I'd like to direct my questions to the Université du Québec. I apologize; I'll be asking my questions in English.

I'd like to talk about a sensitive issue. Removing barriers to equality of opportunity to allow diverse individuals to access federal research funds is a laudable goal. However, the Government of Canada has faced some controversy in Quebec on this front by applying certain eligibility criteria to the allocation of federal research funds within the province.

In late 2022, a history professor at a Quebec research institution filed a human rights complaint against Université Laval and the Canada research chair program alleging discrimination. His argument was that he was qualified for the position of a Canada research chair in history, but his application was not accepted because he's a white male. In response, in December 2022, Quebec's National Assembly passed a motion that expressed a commitment to merit-based hiring on its university campuses and rejected the imposition of racial or gender quotas by the federal government. All of this is related to the Government of Canada's Canada research chair program requirements that universities meet diversity targets in hiring.

I'll ask you if your university believes the federal government should be able to apply these types of requirements to Quebec-based institutions.

[Céline Poncelin de Raucourt]

Thank you very much, Ms. Rempel Garner.

Your preamble was good. This is an extremely sensitive issue in the academic community, and it's tearing a lot of people apart.

The answer I want to give you is that all academic institutions, together with the granting agencies or councils, are very concerned about ensuring accessibility, equity, diversity, inclusion in the system for an entire profile of researchers and students.

For example, the Université du Québec was built historically to promote the accessibility of groups that were under-represented in university education or in research environments. For example, these are first-generation students, people who are a little older and have families. So we are used to welcoming a wide variety of students, but also of researchers.

Academic institutions' attempts or concerns are to promote a system that is as fair and diverse as possible. It would be wrong to claim in this debate that ensuring that diversity goes against excellence and merit.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Thank you.

Should the committee recommend that the federal government continue to include a specific exclusion of certain genders, ethnicities or sexual orientations as an eligibility requirement for the allocation of federal funds?

[Céline Poncelin de Raucourt]

Yes, it is not a matter of excluding anyone at the outset, but of ensuring that the processes make it possible for the various realities to be taken into account so that people actually have a fair chance of accessing funds and upholding the merit that characterizes them.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

If I'm summarizing what you're saying correctly, the committee shouldn't be recommending that anybody be excluded from federal funds. We should be looking at effective ways to remove the barriers to equality of opportunity that some communities might face, rather than take an exclusionary approach in terms of eligibility criteria for the allocation of federal research funds.

Would that be a correct characterization?

[Céline Poncelin de Raucourt]

I do think that, today, the rules never require anyone to be excluded.

There are situations where you have to go further in certain criteria to make sure you make room. When you have a system that is very focused on certain profiles and you want to make room for new profiles, a balance inevitably has to be reworked. That sometimes leads to certain measures, but the rules are not based on exclusion from the outset.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Do you believe that the Province of Quebec should be able to set priorities for the allocation of federal research funding for research institutions like yours or should it simply be the federal government?

[Céline Poncelin de Raucourt]

Quebec is also fortunate to be able to count on a research ecosystem called the Fonds de recherche du Québec. The coexistence of the two systems has always been very positive for the entire research community in Quebec, but also in Canada. There is a good complementarity between the two systems.

For the time being, I have no concerns about the current operation.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

The setting of provincial strategic research priorities in alignment with federal research priorities has been successful for your institution as a Quebec-based research institution.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Answer very briefly, please.

[Céline Poncelin de Raucourt]

Indeed, many of our researchers and research communities have niches of expertise that respond to Canada's challenges, knowing that, for many, these challenges are also those of the Quebec population.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go to Ms. Bradford for six minutes, please.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you so much to both of our witnesses.

I'll start with Mr. Larivière.

You indicated that the concentration of funding leads to diminished results, based on the research that you've done worldwide. You indicated that the cost of research is higher in the larger universities and the quality of research is not any better.

Can you give us your thoughts as to why this might be?

[Dr. Vincent Larivière]

Thank you for your question.

I'll reframe the findings to be more specific. What we are seeing at the organizational level is that the better funded a university is overall, the higher the cost of the published papers. In the literature, one of the hypotheses to explain the diminishing returns is that we need more researchers to make more discoveries. My colleague Ms. Poncelin de Raucourt spoke about this earlier.

As a professor, I have a limited number of hours in my week. There are only 24 hours in a day for everyone. If I'm given more money, I can't necessarily work more. In that case, the money should be given to someone else. If we want to make even more discoveries, giving researchers minimal amounts of funding is not what we should do. We need to spread funding across more researchers, but adequate funding, of course. That way, we can produce more research.

For example, a $100,000 grant given to a large university is a drop in the bucket. However, giving the same amount to a smaller university can really make a difference.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Poncelin de Raucourt, you indicated that many of the U15 universities tend to be located in large urban centres and have medical schools. They tend to get a lot of research dollars just because of that focus.

We heard from an earlier witness on the previous panel—she was from a smaller university, like the University of Lethbridge—that it's like a hamster wheel. You're trying to break in as a smaller university to get into the larger grouping with the bigger pool of resources.

I'm wondering if you could elaborate on your thoughts as to how universities can attempt that. It is difficult to do the grant writing, etc.

I know that in the budget that we produced the other day, the number of graduate scholarships has been increased. You indicated that this was one thing that could help address this.

Can you give us some other suggestions?