Science and Research committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Ladies and gentlemen of the committee, good evening. I am the vice-president of the Research Grants and Scholarships Directorate at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, or NSERC. NSERC is a federal research funding agency. It

Science and Research committee  Is there a disconnect? I think we're all seeing the same data. The data speaks for itself. There is a decrease of publications in French. I can only speak for NSERC here. I cannot speak for the social sciences and the health sciences granting councils. For NSERC, we see, as I men

Science and Research committee  Perhaps I can relate my own personal experience. Before joining the public service, I spent most of my career as a professor at McGill University. I'm obviously a francophone. I was doing work in molecular genetics. I submitted my grant applications in English, because I did not

Science and Research committee  I don't think I can answer that question. I left McGill 17 years ago.

Science and Research committee  We will of course welcome applications in either language, French or English. Again, it goes back to institutional support for researchers. That varies greatly, and this is what the data tells us at NSERC. Different institutions have different success rates in French and in Engli

Science and Research committee  There's no single answer to this question. As I mentioned, at NSERC, we work very hard to ensure that the evaluation of grant applications is fair. I say that humbly. Since there are variations among academic institutions, it's unlikely that success rates will vary because of N

Science and Research committee  I would say that this is a multifaceted problem, and no one organization can be held responsible for it. We're seeing it a little bit internationally as well, aren't we?

Science and Research committee  Of course.

Science and Research committee  I have some. Of course, we have—

Science and Research committee  I'll give you with some 10-year data from 2009 to 2018, on average, for all NSERC programs. In fact, if we dig deeper, we see that the data varies by program. If we group all programs together, we see an average French success rate of 73%, compared to the average success rate o

Science and Research committee  That's exactly what I was saying earlier. We need to dispel the myth that the success rate is lower for applications written in French. At NSERC, numbers show the opposite trend. In fact, the rate is slightly higher for requests in French across all programs.

Science and Research committee  There's still work to be done in this regard. Our data is public, and we're always happy to work with stakeholders to demystify it. Still, I'm convinced that more could be done.

Science and Research committee  Yes, the gap is large. I don't know if any research has been done, but I can tell you that this is very frequently discussed. At NSERC, every time we put together an initiative or a program, we ask ourselves this question to make sure there's no unconscious bias. We don't have

Science and Research committee  NSERC and the other two granting agencies, SSHRC and CIHR, signed on to DORA two or three years ago, I think. Don't quote me, but it's something like this. It's fairly recent. Two elements are important for the implementation of DORA. One, which may seem trivial, is that we nee

Science and Research committee  In NSERC, the question of open access is a challenging one. There is a whole business enterprise around scientific publications. An earlier witness talked about the big publishers, the Elseviers and Springers of the world. It's changing a paradigm from that system that has been