Science and Research Committee on Sept. 24th, 2026

[Paula Kirton, Director General, Investigator Initiated Research, Canadian Institutes of Health Research]

If we take into account the fact that 2% of the applications we receive are in French, this gives us a 26% capacity to carry out the evaluation process.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

So, since you don't receive many requests in French, that allows you to justify the fact that you are unable to have fluently bilingual assessors.

[Paula Kirton]

This enables us to meet needs and organize assessments to a very high standard. As for the evaluations we receive, we carry out translations within the committees to support evaluators who do not speak French so that they can take part in the discussions. Furthermore, the 26% of quality evaluators across Canada give us the opportunity to carry out these evaluations, which account for 2%.

We really need to take the request level into account. The demand for French, in our organization, accounts for 2%.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Don't you think that, if 100% of the people on the assessment committees were fluent in French, there might be more applications submitted in French?

[Paula Kirton]

It would be absolutely brilliant if we received more applications, if more French speakers were available to us, and if we could recruit them to our committees. We are currently at 26%, which is a good figure relative to the number of applications we receive.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

All right.

Ms. Lamoureux, what are your thoughts on this? I know that the SSHRC is making an effort and that there are slightly more people on the assessment committee who are proficient in French. That said, why is it that you are unable to ensure that, 100% of the time, you have people who are capable of assessing applications in French?

[Sylvie Lamoureux]

Thank you for the question.

There are numerous factors at play, which go far beyond the reality of the organizations themselves. In the first part of the meeting, just before this one, it was pointed out that education is a provincial responsibility. We must first ensure that members of the teaching staff, whether at colleges or universities, have the necessary language skills and that these are assessed. As far as assessment is concerned, I am less concerned about whether they can speak French than about their reading ability. That is my opinion, as a human being called Sylvie Lamoureux.

Through the network we aim to establish with funding bodies, we will be able to recruit further people and expand this network so that our colleagues can also benefit from it. It was very interesting, last May, to have discussions with our colleagues from France. They mentioned that they receive a huge number of written requests in English in France, where the official language is French. They face the same challenges when it comes to finding assessors in all specific fields who are proficient in French. One of the reasons is that they are in extremely high demand. In Canada, we need these assessors for the Fonds de recherche du Québec. We need them for the federal granting councils. Consequently, this is a group of people who are in extremely high demand.

Furthermore, we are still living with the legacy of decisions dating back to the beginning of the last century concerning the possibility of being educated in one's own language—French—at post-secondary level, right through to the end of one's studies.

So, all these factors combine to explain the challenge of finding assessors to evaluate applications in French. We are doing everything we can to address this and increase that number.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you.

We will now start our second round of questioning with MP Baldinelli for five minutes, please.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being with us today.

I want to follow up with Ms. Thompson, if I may.

In your exchange with my colleague, you were talking about the race-based data, which is part of the applications. You mentioned that it is voluntary—it's not required—and you mentioned that it is not assessed, but you did say that it's “monitored”. I'd like to ask the question: Who exactly is monitoring this data if it's being supplied in the applications?

[Anne-Marie Thompson]

Thank you for the question.

We do, and we post a number of different types of dashboards and statistics on our website. When I say that we monitor, it means that we're looking at the trends. We look at this data to understand the changes that might be happening in the research ecosystem in terms of who's participating.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

It's all maintained by NSERC and not shared with any other government department, then.

[Marcel Turcot, Vice-President, Strategic, Corporate and Public Affairs, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council]

No. The data is protected by the Privacy Act. In order to handle the data, you have to have specific training, and it is not shared. It is protected.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

During the 44th Parliament, this committee also did a report entitled “Revitalizing Research and Scientific Publication in French in Canada”. The report contained 17 recommendations.

Specifically, six touched on the tri-agencies. I want to get feedback on the responses from the tri-agencies to those recommendations to see if the recommendations put forward by this committee have been implemented in any way. I noticed that the CIHR talked about some of the quotas with regard to funding.

“Recommendation 9”, for example, says that “a quota of the funding awarded by each of the granting agencies...be determined and used as a minimum level of funding for research conducted or published in French.” Has this been accepted by all the tri-agencies? It seems to have been with the CIHR.

We'll start with you, Ms. Thompson.

[Anne-Marie Thompson]

Thank you.

The exact same methodology has not been applied at NSERC. It is something we look at, and we do look at the rates. We monitor this kind of data on application rates and award rates comparatively. This is how we see through observation—we haven't instituted this ourselves—that this outcome is happening. We have an approximately equal application rate and award rate for francophone applications.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

What would the percentage be, then?

[Anne-Marie Thompson]

I'll speak to the discovery grants program. It's our largest program. It is only 3.1% of applications, on average, that we receive in French.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

Recommendation 10, for example, suggests that “the granting agencies...take concrete steps to encourage researchers to submit funding applications in French and that they publicly report on their progress”. Has any of that been done, and have steps been taken to encourage more French research and additional applications to come in? Have any concrete steps been taken by any of the agencies with regard to that?

We'll start with you, Ms. Lamoureux.

[Sylvie Lamoureux]

Thank you for the question.

Some concrete steps have been taken. One very specific one that I can announce today, which we shared with our program committee this morning, so you're finding out before the ecosystem, is that we've created a new Impact Award for research in French. The Impact Awards are the highest recognition that SSHRC has. Based on our preparations for our presentation at the session you mentioned and the work that we were doing preparing for the committee, we realized that to walk the talk, it was important to have the recognition of an Impact Award dedicated to the Francophonie. The details will be shared when we launch this, but that's a very big step.

Another concrete way that we do this is to make sure that it doesn't matter where I am in Canada: Whether I'm speaking at an English college or university or speaking in French in Quebec or B.C., as with my elocution today, I am doing it in both official languages. It sends an important message recognizing that there are anglophone speakers and francophone speakers across this whole country and makes sure they understand that the funding agencies value bilingualism, which means valuing French and valuing English.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

My last question is for all of you.

Could you prepare a written submission on the responses to the recommendations from the previous report and how the tri-agencies have responded individually to each of those six recommendations that are mentioned?

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you.

With that, we will now proceed to MP Rana for five minutes.

Please go ahead, MP Rana.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to all of the witnesses.

I have been an engineer and a science student throughout my life, so my question is for Ms. Thompson and the engineering research council.

NSERC appeared before this committee in 2022 saying that “only 10% of the applications [were] submitted in French”.

Are the stats still the same, or have they changed?

[Anne-Marie Thompson]

Thank you for the question.

It depends on which programs we're looking at. When I talked about 3.1%, that was very specifically for our discovery grants program. There are 10,000 to 11,000 researchers who are supported through that program, so it's a very broad base, depending on some of the files. For instance, in the college portfolio, there is a very high rate of participation by francophone institutions. It varies a bit program by program. On the whole, the 10% across the organization makes sense. It's smaller, unfortunately, in the discovery grants program.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

The report cites NSERC data showing that discovery grants program applications submitted in English are funded at a higher rate than those submitted in French, with a wider gap outside Quebec. What explains that, and what is NSERC doing in response?

[Anne-Marie Thompson]

Thank you for the question.

Yes, it does really matter when you start to break it down by region and by category of researcher. I can say that for established researchers from large institutions, whether they're anglophone or francophone submissions, the success rate is approximately the same. That's the case for medium-sized universities as well. We see more of a difference in smaller organizations or smaller institutions, and that's a multifactor item to look at. It's not simply the language; there are other factors there.

We also see in early-career researchers that there's a bigger difference, but for established researchers, the success rates in large and medium universities are similar.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Dr. Lamoureux, SSHRC results by language are stronger than those of the other two agencies. What does SSHRC do differently, and what could the other agencies learn?