Madam Chair, distinguished members of the Standing Committee on Science and Research, guests and colleagues, thank you for the invitation to testify before this committee.
I appear before you as the former co-chair of the external advisory panel, whose report you are currently studying.
My presentation will include three points and two recommendations. I'm going to briefly go back to the notion of substantive equality, talk quickly about the report's recommendations and then about your work, so the next steps. I will then share my two recommendations.
You are all aware that the notion of substantive equality is a principle of interpretation of language rights that has been enshrined in the Official Languages Act since 2023. It's a principle based on the idea that there are forms of discrimination based on contextual factors. The courts have also pointed out in a number of cases that these contextual factors, whether normative elements or unconscious biases, for example, impose constraints on the possibility of fair treatment for French-speaking people. Here, I would obviously refer you to the DesRochers v Canada (Industry) decision, in the field of employability, which actually led to an initial filter, the forerunner of what is now called the francophone lens.
There are also studies, particularly those led by Acfas and the Association des collèges et universités de la francophonie canadienne, that have shown that there are systemic biases against francophone or French-speaking researchers in Canada's research ecosystem.
Data from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council show that, in some cases, the success rate of projects in French is higher than those in English. However, this is inaccurate for research in a francophone minority context, where the success rate, according to the data, is 10% below the average of 42%. In Quebec, for example, only 8.9% of applications are submitted in French, particularly to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and 12% in the case of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. This means that when we talk about higher success rates, we must also remember that, in absolute numbers, the number of applications in French is still clearly inadequate, even if we include those coming from Quebec.
The task force also looked at contextual factors. Looking at the issue of unconscious bias or perceptions of unconscious bias, we saw that those could have harmful consequences for professors' careers, or even for students' future careers and their socialization in the scientific research community. We noted a significant lack of programs in French at postgraduate levels, particularly in minority settings, and that, in general, this bias towards English in research did not allow the country to benefit from French as an official language in its international visibility. It prevents us from contributing to the scientific and professional vocabulary in French or to research heritage.
Cases we have studied have shown that, in many respects, in Canadian research, French is treated as a minor language, not as an official language. This situation distorts the economy and the research ecosystem in favour of a subjective prestige economy with an English bias. You could say this is a situation that is not unique to Canada. However, in Canada, given that French and English are the two official languages, there is reason to be outraged at this situation and to want to change things.
This brings me to my second point: the recommendations in the report.
As you can see, we made three main recommendations, with positive measures for their implementation. Among those recommendations, I would like to highlight a very important one, in our opinion, which is to establish a research in French support and promotion fund investing $40 million Canadian annually to research in French, complimenting existing investments. We also recommend to strengthen governance in official languages by creating a secretariat for research in French. We also recommend that the government set an example.
As a reminder, the $40 million we are requesting represents only 1% of total annual research funding, so it's not unreasonable. It can also be used to create research programs that we've called “francophone missions”—