Thank you for your question. It's an excellent one.
Our association represents francophone researchers across the country. I've often said that being a francophone researcher in a Quebec university is completely different from being a francophone researcher in an anglophone or bilingual university elsewhere, for example at a francophone campus like the University of Alberta's Campus Saint-Jean. They are two completely different realities.
In June 2021, we published a report at the end of a two-year study in which we surveyed some 500 francophone researchers across Canada, excluding Quebec. One of the findings was that their teaching load was higher than for a francophone professor in a Quebec university, as is the case for my president. They have more courses to teach, more marking to do, and more administrative tasks. Universities and faculty members have three missions: teaching, research and community services. One of these missions is already overloaded and the other two remain. They definitely have less time for research and for finding funding for their research.
They need help to have more time. We were saying earlier that university funding is a provincial jurisdiction. Not only that, but it's the institutions themselves that decide whether or not to create faculty positions. Nevertheless, it's important to at least continue to emphasize that francophone faculty members, irrespective of their university's status, are entitled to submit funding applications in French. It's in the legislation. If their university can't provide them with the traditional forms of support, we now offer a new service. I won't go into the details, but there are some uncomplicated ways to facilitate the research grant application process for francophone researchers.
To increase funding for research in French, there have to be more applications. For there to be more applications, improved conditions in the institutions are required. What's needed, therefore, is a linked process that begins by making it easier in the institutions to submit funding applications in French, to enable universities like the University of Saskatchewan to submit some very solid funding applications in French—francophone researchers are just as good as anglophone researchers—and this would generate more research funding.
Every link in this chain has a role to play.