Okay, thank you.
Without abandoning the excellence criterion, the committee should look into new mechanisms for distributing funding, particularly from the standpoint of the Official Languages Act, which acknowledges that French is in a minority position in Canada and North America. This requires the introduction of positive measures. The language factor should be among the considerations and options used by the Canadian government to allocate funding for university research. A better linguistic distribution can only be achieved by giving more support to small and medium-sized universities.
The new distribution of federal funding should factor in principles that Acfas considers essential to an effective research ecosystem. These principles include promoting researchers; promoting basic research; acknowledging the identity-building and cultural mandate of local universities and universities not located in major cities, which are essential to the vitality of francophone minority communities; equitable funding for members of the francophone Canadian scientific community; and the need to have francophone international students in numbers that exceed the relative demographic weight of francophones in Canada, particularly at the higher levels of education.
Thank you for your attention.