Good morning Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
My name is Martin Maltais. I'm the president of Acfas, the Association francophone pour le savoir, and a professor of finance and educational policy at the Université du Québec à Rimouski. I am also a member of the Laboratoire interdisciplinaire de recherche sur l'enseignement supérieur.
With me today is Sophie Montreuil, the executive director of Acfas. We are honoured to be able to contribute to the committee's work on the distribution of federal government funding among Canada's post-secondary institutions.
Over the past one hundred years, Acfas has made an outstanding contribution to the transmission of knowledge in French, and to the advancement of the francophone research community in the French-speaking world.
Acfas has six regional offices across Canada outside of Quebec. We contribute directly to the vitality of research in French and to the promotion of knowledge across Canada. We contribute on an everyday basis to the prosperity and prestige of our country.
I'd like to provide a bit of background at the outset. In view of the new Official Languages Act and the new positive measures in part VII to promote science and research in French in Canada, our association can only reiterate how important it is for Canada to mine the expertise of its two major research language communities to find ways to address the major challenges of society and promote our country and its researchers.
We agree with the recommendations made in the report from the advisory panel on the federal research support system, known as the Bouchard report, and in your committee's report on research and scientific publication in French. We also welcome the additional funding for granting agencies announced by the government in its most recent budget, and the eagerly awaited increase in scholarships awarded to graduate and post-graduate students.
Right off the bat, the goal of your study is interesting for its use of the word “between”, which introduces the concept of a gap, or space, within a group of components. There is indeed a major gap between Canadian post-secondary institutions in terms of their capacity to receive research funding from the government of Canada.
Let's look at a few facts. In 2020–2021, 74% of federal government funding for University research was shared by 15 institutions, which accounted for only 52% of faculty and 59% of the graduate student community; 77% of these public funds went to the 20% of researchers who were already receiving the most funding. Among these universities, only two are francophone, and only one bilingual. The 12 anglophone universities in the U15 group share approximately 60% of Canadian government funding, even though they have just over 40% of faculty and graduate students.
The two francophone universities share just over 10%, and account for 8% of faculty, and 14% of graduate students in Canada. These two universities are definitely more productive in terms of graduates.
Also in 2021, 2.9% of funding from the three granting agencies went to colleges. Without abandoning the excellence criterion…