The first thing is to increase the total amount. Right now, the amount that each student can receive is being increased, but the number of students with access to the funds in question remains limited. Only yesterday, students were asking me if they were certain to get a scholarship if they excelled in their studies. My answer is always “no”.
From the financial standpoint, pursuing higher education is not appealing to students. When the costs and benefits are analyzed, higher education, research, and innovation are not financially rewarding. I am currently working on a Ph.D., and in comparison to others who began working after their bachelor's degree, they are earning a lot more than I am, and their living conditions are much better than mine. Yet Canada's ranking for research depends on the number of students who are conducting research and driving innovation. I would therefore say that overall funding has to be increased.
We also talked at length about francophone students. Our proposal is that the three granting councils should include francophone identity as one of the factors in establishing minority status, as is done for black or indigenous people, and that francophones should receive priority funding because most of them have trouble studying, publishing and receiving support in French, or even finding a francophone research supervisor.
More money is really needed. There's absolutely no doubt about it. What the government mainly has to do is make funding conditional. At the moment, when the government gives money to the universities, it doesn't tell them where they should be spending it. Sometimes universities receive money that doesn't end up in the hands of students. It goes instead to pay large salaries to senior university administrators, which is rather distressing when you compare their living conditions to those of students. So more funding is needed, and it's important to ensure that it gets paid directly to the students.