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I call the meeting to order. This is meeting number 81 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research.
Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the Standing Orders. All members are in the room, but we do have some witnesses on Zoom.
For those on Zoom, you can speak in the official language of your choice. You can choose floor, English or French at the bottom of your screen. If we do lose interpretation or sound quality, please let me know immediately and we will suspend while we restore interpretation.
For members participating in person, I'll recognize you before you speak and your mic will be controlled, as usual, by the proceedings and verification officer.
In the room we have a great sound system, but we need to keep our earphones away from the microphone so that we don't create feedback events. We can make sure we're mindful of that, protecting the safety of our interpreters as well as those in the room with earphones in.
All comments should come through the chair. Please speak slowly and clearly, and when you are not speaking your mic should be on mute.
We have a speaking list. The clerk and I will do the best we can to maintain the order of speakers.
Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(i) and the motions adopted by the committee on Tuesday, January 30, and Thursday, February 15, 2024, the committee resumes its study on the distribution of federal government funding among Canada's post-secondary institutions.
It's now my pleasure to welcome, in the room, from the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies, Philippe-Edwin Bélanger, president, and Dr. Fahim Quadir, vice-president. We have, virtually, from the Canadian Association of University Teachers, Dr. Robin Whitaker. We also have Dr. Eric Weissman from the Post-secondary Student Homeless/Housing Research Network on video conference.
You'll each have five minutes for your remarks and then we'll go to the questioning rounds.
Starting us off, we will hear from the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies.
Greetings. I want to thank the committee for inviting me as a representative of the Post-secondary Student Homeless/Housing Research Network. I would also like to add in response to my colleagues that I actually was a CAGS recipient of the Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2014, so thank you.
I'm an associate professor at UNB in Saint John. I'm known as a lived experience scholar. I have been in recovery from addictions and episodic homelessness for about 28 years. Most of my work focuses on these areas, and on finding ways to incorporate lived experience in qualitative research, and also seeing students' or other potential researchers' life courses as evidence of skills and qualifications deserving of recognition and funding. I will return to this later.
Since 2016 we have been studying post-secondary student homelessness. The work began as surveys at sites across Canada. In 2021, our network, anchored at UNB in Saint John, expanded to eight sites and was funded by Making the Shift Inc., part of the Networks of Centres of Excellence of Canada. The research asks what students, faculty, administrators and researchers think the role of institutions and government should be in assisting them with housing and other costs.
One might ask how research on student housing bears on innovations in the funding of research in Canada. The housing piece is a key ingredient for student success at all levels of the post-secondary experience. I agree with the comments made by Dr. Vaugeois on March 21 and many others about what I would call implicit biases toward funding previously funded scholars and institutions. They do lead to overt disparities, great frustration and demoralization among researchers, especially in smaller settings. I am going to address how rethinking housing supports will support researchers and, hence, research.
Five per cent of Canada's 2.2 million post-secondary students live in some form of homelessness. That's close to 110,000 students every day. Sixty-four per cent of them allocate more than 30% of their income to housing. Fifty per cent suffer mental health issues, and at some of our smaller sites in our research close to 70% of students would leave school if faced with that hardship and over 30% had done so in the past.
Equity-denied groups were overrepresented in the data. Close to 80% of post-secondary students are youths 17 to 29. The other 20% or so are older, many returning students in graduate programs seeking to reinvent themselves through research practices towards purposeful lives in a changing economy. Many have families and housing pressures and many live in housing precarity through this reinvention.
Regional colleges and polytechnics may be smaller than large urban universities, but they play instrumental roles in maintaining workforces and contributing to practical research. So when we're funding research, or tuition, we are funding student life courses that are more complicated than traditionally thought of, more than the research, more than the ideas. The research is intertwined in these complex life courses. It's time to consider what more the government can do to support this important piece, the housing piece.
Supporting student housing will directly lead to the well-being of students, encourage long-term research tracks, and increase graduate and post-graduate attendance. An overwhelming majority of students and other respondents in our work feel it is incumbent on the federal government to help with this urgent part of their education, and they balk at applying to graduate programs because of this cost factor.
On two of my research projects this year I have had gifted students who found the pressure of maintaining their housing and their schooling too difficult and in the midst of the research had to take leave from their research positions. I believe in anecdotal evidence. My colleagues will tell you how common housing-related precarities are among our research assistants and the effect it has on our research. Be it AI or the cost of living, post-secondary is facing several existential threats. The future of research in Canada is not simply about funding research, but about funding the post-secondary experience better to guarantee basic needs and encourage potential researchers to stay in school. Our respondents agree that tempering the housing piece itself will yield long-term benefits to post-secondary and to Canadian research literacy in the future.
I have more that I would like to address perhaps in the question period. I would like to mention as well, based on my own experience, the support I got from Concordia University as a person with unconventional.... I left school when I was in the middle of a Ph.D. in the late 1980s and had a massive gap in my experience. I finally got into a program where they valued lived experience at Concordia and the results—CAGS is witness to this—were a really interesting form of research.
One of the things our respondents and our entire network believes in is that the government must get involved in figuring out ways to fund and to value non-academic and lived experiences similarly to the ways we value track records.
Thank you very much.
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Good afternoon. I join you from St. John's, Newfoundland, the ancestral homelands of the Beothuk and Mi'kmaq peoples. Thank you for undertaking this important study.
I'm vice-president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which represents 72,000 researchers, teachers, librarians and general staff at universities, colleges and polytechnics across the country. I'm also a professor at Memorial University, a comprehensive research university.
Federal support for research is critically important to current and future challenges. Over time we've seen changes to what the federal government funds, who it funds and on what basis. What that history tells us about how to distribute federal research funds to ensure the greatest benefits for Canadians can be summarized as follows: First, we need to ensure adequate support for basic research; second, programs must be inclusive of all disciplines and researchers; and third, the integrity and independence of research and funding decisions must be respected.
Fundamental science—or basic research—is the foundation of knowledge and innovation. It may not have specific applications built into its design, but history shows that most important discoveries are grounded in basic research driven by a quest for knowledge. Fundamental research has led to such unanticipated innovations as X-rays, nylon, Teflon, GPS technology, informatics, superconductivity, medical imaging and the mRNA vaccines. In short, applied and mission-driven research cannot thrive if fundamental research is struggling.
The advisory panel on federal support for fundamental science suggested, at minimum, a three-to-one distribution of investments in research between basic and applied. Some experts suggest the ratio should be closer to four to one if we're to reap the best rewards for society. As the most recent advisory panel on the federal research support system stated:
Fundamental, investigator-initiated research is the cornerstone of the research endeavour and must be supported at internationally competitive levels.
The panel called for, as a first step, an increase of at least 10% annually for five years to the councils' total base budgets for their core grant programming. This increase would benefit researchers across Canada at all kinds of institutions. If we look at the new frontiers fund for interdisciplinary research, the success rate—the number of applications to awards—is only 23%, for CIHR it's 18%, and for NSERC and SSHRC it's 58% and 54% respectively. Notably, applications are down at SSHRC by 33% in the last decade, contributing to a somewhat misleading 29% rise in success.
We know, from members, that many grant applications are approved on merit but go unfunded due to insufficient funds. Unfunded research means good ideas are left unexplored, ideas that would contribute to our collective knowledge and know-how. This unfunded research also means lost support and training for graduate students. Increases to scholarships, fellowships and research grants, which support two out of three grad students, will particularly benefit small and medium institutions with fewer resources to fund talent.
In addition to inadequate funding levels, system fairness would be enhanced by a better balanced allocation of funds across the tri-council. The majority of Canadian researchers work in the social sciences and humanities, yet SSHRC receives only about one-fifth of federal research funding. Fairness would be enhanced too by renewing funds for the dimensions program, launched by the tri-council in 2018 and overseen by NSERC. This program supported participating institutions in breaking down barriers. Its end in 2023 disproportionately impacted smaller institutions, which have fewer resources to advance equity, diversity and inclusion. Addressing administrative barriers, such as the common CV, will further assist in the fair distribution of funds, benefitting small and medium institutions with less internal support for researchers. CAUT also supports recommendations made by this committee's report, "Revitalizing Research and Scientific Publication in French in Canada", to improve access to resources that help make research and scientific knowledge in French more accessible.
Protecting the integrity of federally supported science and research is critical to our success. Federal government budgets have, at times, announced targeted research funding that bypassed the peer-review process. Rather than allowing the scientific community to determine what research merits funding, targeted initiatives required the granting agencies to direct funds toward industrial collaborations, specific disciplines or topics. However, as John Polanyi, Canada's most prominent Nobel laureate, warned, when governments or industry try to direct scientific inquiry, bypassing the rigorous peer-review system through which the scientific community protects its integrity, our scientific horizons shrink and our future is diminished. Attempts to forecast what research will be relevant have a dismal history and only lead to the inequitable channelling of funding into politically or commercially desired forms of applied research.
Certainly, applied research is important, but projects should be assessed on their merits, alongside basic or theoretical research through the established processes of peer review.
Thank you.
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I would be happy to do so.
I think the current system is structured around two assumptions. They're not directly related to students' funding support; they're related to the support faculty members would normally receive from tri-agencies. Based on the success rate of the faculty members, each university would receive quotas for doctoral students and master's students.
Then, I think it would be looked at from the student success perspective. For doctoral and master's students, the numbers would be determined by the success rates of their particular institutions. This allows particular institutions and a select group of students to access resources available to our graduate student community. In doing so, we often ignore the fact that good, solid graduate students are present in many different parts of the country. Because of the very fact that faculty success rates are not always the same at every single institution, their quotas are not likely to be exactly the same as in some cases.
This system really encourages particular locations and particular institutions to benefit more than all graduate students with academic excellence.
You can look at it from a graduate student's perspective; there are numerous reasons why a graduate student would not really want to move from the place where they're currently situated, due to their caregiving responsibilities, family responsibilities and other financial responsibilities. Even if they have the excellence, they may not necessarily be able to move to another institution and be part of a vibrant culture of research.
How do you recognize those talents and continue to support their success stories? I think the current system, unfortunately, is not doing it. I think we have myths about locations and places. The system we are proposing would really allow us to make the whole system much more accessible for graduate students, regardless of their location, regardless of their affiliation with a particular institution.
We need to foster a culture of excellence.
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Yes, I agree. We underscored in our presentation that smaller universities are indeed experiencing specific difficulties, primarily because of their administrative capacity to respond to calls for projects and major competitions. The smaller universities do not have specialized personnel for every competition, in all programs or in all fields.
Indeed, when a major initiative is put in place, whether it be the Canada Foundation for Innovation or federal research councils, the smaller universities, which often have to conform to the same deadlines and the same rules, have a harder time meeting the challenge because they don't have the same organizational capacity.
In future, I think it would be a good idea if research funding took account of the specific situation facing smaller institutions, precisely so they can respond to competitions and calls for projects.
Thanks to all the witnesses for being here today.
Maybe I'll start by going back to your opening remarks, Mr. Quadir and Mr. Bélanger, which were quite good.
Maybe I misheard or I didn't understand completely, or perhaps you ran through it a bit too quickly for my attention this morning. Maybe I was too focused on the federal budget in anticipation of this afternoon.
Can you slow down and describe to me what you are specifically proposing?
I understood there were two policy changes. You're saying there's a need for a new framework, but I want to make sure I fully understand what you meant by that. I wasn't sure whether I completely captured it in my mind.
Could you maybe revisit that?
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Thank you all for being here.
I'm going to start with you, Dr. Whitaker, if only because you're at Memorial University where I did my research many years ago. It's good to have someone here from MUN.
Memorial is one of these small to medium-sized institutions. It's big enough to have a medical faculty, but it's not part of the really big university group of research institutions in Canada.
Could you expand on the difficulties of institutions in that category in terms of attracting research funds? We've heard a lot about support for grad students. Most grad students get their support directly from their supervisors, who are getting their funding largely from the federal government. Could you speak to the difficulties of a small to medium-sized institution like Memorial in attracting those funds?
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Thanks so much for that question. It certainly does speak to issues affecting graduate students.
I think this points to a couple of issues. One is that we need to think about a larger amount of funding available across the board. I don't think it's helpful to set this up as a kind of competition between different institutions. We're looking at finding ways for the entire system to thrive, but that also means taking a broader approach than simply looking at research funding. We need to look at the foundation as well.
There are challenges in terms of, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, the administrative burden that often faces researchers at some institutions where there aren't as many supports on site. This affects both the ability to apply for research and the ability to make the best use we can of research funds when we get them.
It's time that we had a broad national conversation about the best way to support post-secondary education and research across the board, and that certainly includes the availability of research funding, which will benefit graduate students in terms of both fellowships and scholarships and in terms of training opportunities, but the foundation also needs to be there so that we can leverage that funding and really do our best for Canada.
Now I'd like to turn to Dr. Weissman.
Thank you for bringing up the issue of housing—in this day and age when housing is one of the real critical crises of the nation as a whole—and how it affects students and thereby directly affects research across Canada.
In my riding, I have two small institutions, both colleges, Okanagan College and Selkirk College. We have a real housing crisis in our region. Housing prices are very high, and wages tend to be low. Both of those institutions are trying to tackle that problem of housing.
I'm wondering if you could expand on how those housing issues affect the students who are doing most of the research.
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I can give you two very concrete examples from our own network.
Two of our research partners are the University of Alberta and Nova Scotia Community College. At the University of Alberta, they introduced a safe home project for students. It's an emergency-type of housing for students who are intermittently, not chronically, experiencing loss of shelter for a variety of different reasons.
In Nova Scotia, we have a great deal of students who are living very close to the poverty line or below it. For other reasons—perhaps they lose their job, they get ill or they miss a paycheque—they lose their housing, so they have to choose between school or finding another job.
They introduced, in co-operation with the city, a number of programs for subsidized units in the city to specifically house students who are in emergency shelter need. As a result, they've serviced dozens of students over the last several years who have been able to stay in school, maintain their research tracks, finish their degrees and go on to their graduate degrees.
In my own work, I've taught in five provinces and two states. Everywhere that I've been, I've worked with students who are sometimes the first in their families to go to university, especially here in Saint John. Many of them are going on to graduate school at UNB or other places, and we have a very high poverty rate here. We have an accepted narrative that it's okay to suffer through school, so you have people who have been reinventing themselves or who see their housing precarity as not a great issue, and then they get into graduate school and they're working incredible hours. They're trying to work, and then something has to go. They can't lose their housing.
In our research, 70% of students said they would leave if they faced homelessness, and that is what's happening across the board.
That was a bridge to my questions for Mr. Bélanger and Mr. Quadir.
There's this notion of quotas, where funding is attached to student population. I understand where you're going with it, but don't you think it would just incent institutions to juice their numbers, as opposed to looking at overall student experience? If we have a set quota experience, what would stop universities from just increasing numbers or counting virtual students, and not accounting for things like housing when we're in the middle of a major housing crisis?
That's point number one.
The second concern I have with quotas is that they might have a perverse outcome. I'll be very honest with you. The people who are in front of this committee the most—more importantly, in front of public servants the most—are highly paid lobbyists from the U15 Group. They have a whole advocacy group. They are constantly in front of public servants. I am not convinced a quota system wouldn't make outcomes worse for smaller institutions because of the lobbying presence of larger institutions, which could easily gamify a quota system that would work in their favour, putting a cap on the ability of smaller institutions to expand student experience.
If quotas aren't the be-all and end-all, what else could we be doing? Are there ways to perhaps decouple graduate student funding from professorship funding and look at having more access to rural institutions or colleges? Frankly, we're always looking at the rural versus urban metric here. Perhaps we should be looking at affordable versus unaffordable institutions, as well.
What else could we be doing? What else, outside of quotas, is a way to solve this problem?
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Thank you for asking this amazing question.
One of the things we want to do is make graduate education accessible. I think that is the number one priority. If Canada wants to succeed in the current global political economy, we have to consider graduate education as a top priority for the nation.
The second question, which is associated with the first one, is this: How do you make sure the student succeeds? Should you be able to offer funding support so they don't have to go to a food bank or struggle to find the money to cover the cost of housing for the duration of their study?
These two issues, in my view, influence the narrative of graduate education in Canada. I don't think the quota—
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It's a very difficult question.
Universities don't receive really all the support for housing or for offering what we call “living subsidies” to graduate students. In the current environment and in what we normally do, I would say that only about 10% of our students are funded externally by granting councils. Depending on the institution, it could be even lower, at anywhere between 1% and 16% of the students.
The larger body of our graduate student community would be supported internally by us in the institutions. We offer funding support in the form of teaching assistantships, research assistantships, graduate fellowships and university scholarships. All of those things would come from the university.
I have been in graduate education for the last 18 years. What I have been witnessing in the last few years—maybe three or four years—would be almost unparalleled to anything I have ever witnessed in my entire 18 years of graduate administration. It's a crisis situation for universities. As a graduate dean, I cannot really go to bed not thinking of those students who are struggling on a daily basis.
We do whatever we can internally to mobilize resources to support graduate students to make sure they get through this process, and that they get through this process quickly and painlessly, but unfortunately the whole situation is beyond our control. We don't have the resources to support graduate students the way we want.
If I could just go back to the issue of quotas, I tend to think that the quotas we are proposing would benefit all universities, not just a few, and every single university with a graduate population would receive a number of scholarships dedicated entirely to their own students. They should not lose the opportunity to support the graduate students who desperately need funding support for the amazing research activities they've undertaken.
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I'm going to go back to the quota concept again. I think quotas would restore balance to granting scholarships.
I think that the funding situation in terms of francophone versus anglophone universities is improving. For several years now, francophone universities have managed to obtain a slightly larger share of the available funding.
What concerns me about francophone universities is the capacity of francophone communities to submit their grant applications and scholarship applications in French. I think that francophone students in Canada should be assured that scholarship applications are being evaluated in the best way possible.
Personally, I think that more work needs to be done in that regard. I still have some concerns about the linguistic ability of committee members selected by the research councils. My concern has more to do with the evaluation of applications in French.
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Thanks for that. I anticipated that I might get that question.
There are some forms of social science that require larger amounts of money. Polling research and so on sometimes do. But you're right, of course, that the cost of maintaining a medical lab or a basic science lab can be higher than that of many forms of social science research.
I think we're talking not necessarily about an exact balance but rather about a rebalancing with a view to increasing and making access more equitable across the board. About 60% of researchers in Canada are in a SSHRC discipline, so the fact that only one-fifth of the granting council money is dedicated to SSHRC does seem to be something of an inequity. Of course, there is also the question of interdisciplinary research and that new frontiers fund that I mentioned, for which the success rates are quite low. That indicates a lot of potential for research across a variety of disciplines and focuses.
Again, I think the big question is this: What can we do to increase and enhance the health of the system as a whole?
CAUT has suggested a number of measures that we think would help. This committee is doing really important work. As I mentioned, I think it's also time to have that national conversation. Universities and colleges have been struggling for quite some time. The proportion of public funding available has decreased significantly since the early 2000s, and that has an effect on the ability of researchers to best purpose the money that is available at present.
Thanks.
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I call the meeting back to order.
Welcome back. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(i) and the motions adopted by the committee on Tuesday, January 30, and Thursday, February 15, 2024, the committee is resuming its study on the distribution of federal government funding among Canada's post-secondary institutions.
It's now my pleasure to welcome and thank our witnesses for coming this morning.
First, from the Olds College of Agriculture and Technology, we have Dr. Ben Cecil, president and CEO. There's some great work at Olds right now. I'm looking forward to your testimony. The University of Guelph does a lot of similar work.
From the Ontario Tech University, we have Dr. Steven Murphy, president and vice-chancellor, who is joining us via video conference. Welcome, Dr. Murphy.
We'll start with five minutes from each of you. We'll be close on time.
Let's get started with Dr. Ben Cecil for five minutes, please.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Ben Cecil, President and CEO of Olds College of Agriculture & Technology. I am very pleased to be here this afternoon.
I'm here to talk about the distribution of federal government funding impacts on college research activity.
I'd like to address the matter from three perspectives, namely, equity, eligibility and impact.
Let me begin by setting the context of research funding at colleges. There are approximately 120 publicly funded colleges in Canada that support local businesses, entrepreneurs and social innovators through the research expertise of their faculties and staff. These colleges advanced over 8,000 projects, created over 2,400 prototypes, designed over 1,800 new products, developed over 1,000 new process improvements and created over 900 new service offerings, and that was just in 2021-22 alone.
These advancements were driven by industry and business partners that had real challenges their organizations could not solve. They sought the help of a college to assist them in solving real-world problems for their organizations. The intellectual property generated by these advancements remained in the hands of the external partners, ensuring the results of the research remained within the Canadian economy.
I will speak to the impact such advancements have to the economy shortly, and, specifically, within the context of my institution. What I can state at this juncture is that those advancements I cited above were supported with only 2.9% of federal research funding, or about $110 million.
This leads me to my first point which is equity. The federal research funding programs need to be reconsidered and reframed, so colleges are considered as an equal partner in the research ecosystem. Colleges have demonstrated over the last 20 years that they have an impact on the communities and industries they serve. They deliver results to real-world solutions and real-world challenges in real time.
This begs the question, is the distribution of federal research funding addressing the priorities of Canadians? Is the funding supporting the challenge-based research being conducted at colleges adequate to address the issues facing Canadians today, such as climate change, affordable housing and food security to name just a few?
Colleges have risen to the occasion by increasing their capacity and capabilities to support challenge-based research, enhancing Canada's social and economic well-being, yet, they do so on only 2.9% of the federal research budget. There is an opportunity before this committee to help redefine and reframe the role of colleges as equally valued full partners within the federal research funding ecosystem.
I just mentioned colleges as equally valued full partners which leads me to my second point of eligibility. Presently, the federal research funding system uses metrics, such as the number of publications, prior tri-council funding success, holding a research chair position or number of HQPs to award research funds. These are not the metrics of colleges. Our metric and the language we use is impact.
Colleges are being asked to have similar administrative functions and due diligence as universities in areas related to research data security, technology transfer or IP management, ethical compliance and animal care compliance. Colleges cannot support the same level of administrative function as universities without a similar indirect cost funding model as universities. The simultaneous inequity and ineligibility for colleges to receive the same extent of research support funds needs to be re-evaluated.
Finally, I would like to address my last point which is impact. Colleges are deeply embedded in their regional economies. Connected to industry, colleges are asked to help address real-world challenges being brought forth by external partners with real-world solutions they can implement immediately. That linkage between challenge, solution and commercialization is impact. It is measured by revenue growth, job creation, innovation and economic growth through commercialization.
Olds College is ranked number two nationally for research impact amongst colleges. Since its inception in 2018, the smart farm—the cornerstone of research at Olds College—has supported 263 companies and organizations, and 142 projects. This has resulted in 394 process and product improvements with over 720 jobs created. It has contributed over $811 million directly back to the firms that we have worked with, which channels its way directly into the Canadian economy. That's over $6.39 million per small and medium-sized enterprise that we work with. Members of the committee, that's impact.
The college sector provides a significant impact to the Canadian economy. This brings me back to my original question: Is the distribution of federal research funding addressing the priorities of Canadians? Do the investments Canadians make into our research ecosystem have a direct impact on the things that matter most to Canadians, namely, jobs, food security, climate change, affordable housing, etc.?
Are Canadians seeing value in their investment, and is that investment giving them the output and the impact they expect?
Thank you very much to the committee. I look forward to your questions.
Good afternoon, members of the committee. I would like to thank you for having me today. It's good to be back.
I would like to start off by stating that Ontario Tech is a STEM-based institution with approximately 12,000 students. We're located in Oshawa and proud to be in the Durham region.
We do not strive to be a comprehensive university; we know our strengths, energy and engineering, and we focus on them. I'd like to focus my comments today on how Canada can address two major problems related to research.
First, Canada has a productivity problem. We are less productive per capita every year and have fallen behind our traditional global peers. As we know, at the heart of the productivity problem, although the Government of Canada invested $3.42 billion in research in 2021-22, compared to our global peers, Canada has fallen way behind. In 2021, Canada invested just 1.7% of GDP on R and D compared to the U.S. at 3.5%, Japan at 3.3%, Germany at 3.1% and the list goes on.
Academic research and development are major drivers of Canadian innovation and economic growth. Universities conduct more than 40% of Canada's total R and D, producing over $55 billion annually in economic activity and supporting 680,000 direct and indirect jobs in communities of all sizes, including the Durham region. When it comes to research funding, however, Canada is falling well behind our peers, that have made significant new investments to support advanced research training.
At Ontario Tech, we are recognized internationally for our research strength, and our impressive reputational trajectory continues upwards with a fresh distinction as Canada's research university of the year in 2023. In fact, Research Infosource recently reported its five-year university spotlight highlighting a key number of research areas of growth, which I think are germane to our conversation today.
We're ranked number one in Canada in cross-sector collaboration publications percentage growth. That talks about the importance of collaboration in research. We're ranked number two in Canada in corporate research income percentage growth, which means that we are working with corporate entities to solve practical, real-world problems. We're ranked number two in Canada in international collaboration publications percentage growth, which means we're solving research dilemmas that face the globe.
With total university research income now surpassing $23 million annually and growing by about 8% every year, Ontario Tech boasts strong growth in not-for-profit research income, international government research income and international collaboration. A recent international survey ranked us as a top-three engineering school, and we're extremely proud of that. We're leaders in R and D.
The R and D problem is that we have not seen productivity growth in an awfully long time, and, over the past four decades, we have slipped significantly compared to other countries. The Bank of Canada argues that three elements contribute to stronger productivity: capital intensity, labour composition and multifactor productivity. All three of these point to the importance of the job market and being highly trained in fields like AI that will change the productivity needle.
Ontario Tech is well positioned to respond to this labour market demand. It's through the programs in computer science, engineering, business and IT, business analytics and artificial intelligence, where we have really well-established research programs, that we're going to be able to graduate our labour needs to counter the productivity problems. You need to have that cutting-edge research and those ideas that take shape in our students' minds and blossom as they enter the workforce.
The number and dollar amount of Canadian graduate scholarships, as we know, has not kept pace with inflation or the growing graduate student population. It is estimated that, each year, thousands of recent Ph.D.s leave Canada to pursue careers abroad, representing an annual loss of $740 million to the country. This poses a serious problem for our future and our growth.
We urge the committee to focus on ways the government can ensure that sufficient funds are available to all universities and accessible to researchers at institutions of all sizes that submit successful research grant applications.
We're a glowing example of an institution that is only 20 years old but has to go up against the U15 and others with established records. We're really proud of the Canada research chairs we have and the trajectory that we are gaining, but we are definitely swimming against the current.
Every university has its competitive niche. At Ontario Tech, all things energy, engineering and STEM more broadly are our areas. In fact, roughly 60% of our programs are in STEM fields, which exceeds the provincial average by over 20%.
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Some of the challenges we face in agriculture are part of what is known as the grand global challenge: How do we continue to feed more people on less land with fewer negative impacts of commercialized agriculture? How do we minimize our carbon footprint and at the same time maintain yields on a continually decreasing scale of operation?
That scale of operation at the individual farm level increases, but globally, the land mass is decreasing. That challenge results in the greater integration of technologies. Therefore, we have programs on technology integration in agriculture.
For our students now, because we are the school of agriculture and technology, the integration of the two is absolutely fundamental to understanding the future of ag.
Here is a case in point. The newest John Deere combine has more onboard computers than a shuttlecraft. With 32 onboard computers, a modern combine basically drives itself, but it doesn't service itself. It needs to have the technical supports in order for the farmer or the producer to actually have the services needed to continue to produce at the scale that literally feeds the world.
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Absolutely. The partnerships we have with industry are foundational to the work we do. While we have had an impact of hundreds of millions of dollars on the regional economy and the national economy, almost all of that support has come directly from industry. Our research profile, while supported a little bit by the tri-council, is primarily supported by industry itself.
We have a direct connection to them because they have problems that they look to us to simply solve. In the context of our role, we can't wait for a Ph.D. student to turn out a paper that has a result after four years. We need solutions in season. In season for us is a very quick turnaround.
The partnerships we have help us continue to advance research, whether it is studying carbon sequestration, nitrogen fixation, ground water support, clean air and clean water or soil productivity, and the list goes on and on.
What impact does that have for our students? We have over 60 students directly connected to research at the college. They are employed by the firms and by the college itself to support research in those firms.
From a curricular perspective, the relationships we have with our industry partners allow us to receive equipment as donations on a regular basis. Every four weeks those donations of equipment are turned over in our labs so that the students are working on the latest and greatest technology, which they will see literally in the field upon graduation. Without those partnerships, we could not do what we do at the college. On any given day, in our trades and skilled trades facilities, we have between $7.5 million and $8 million of equipment on loan. Without our industry partners, we would not have the funding to make that a sustainable operation for the college.
:
Thank you for the question, and it is an intractable one that we have been dealing with since our inception into research about 20, 25 years ago. The third point that I talked about is also eligibility. While there is inequity in the system, part of that comes from the fact that colleges are simply not allowed to access certain funds.
It's the way that they are structured. With the infrastructure investment grants that NSERC held for a number of years, colleges were eligible. We are also eligible under the new mobilize grant. However, the mobilize pot is much smaller than it was under the IEs, and as such, eligibility is limited.
People have indicated to this panel before that colleges are available to hold Canada research chairs. However, with the criteria under which Canada research chairs are evaluated, colleges don't qualify, so it doesn't matter how large the CCIP pot is and how much the pool is within any given institution: If it's ineligible, it's ineligible. Therefore, it's about creating that equity.
:
I think I'll illustrate it with an example. At our university, because of our location and our history, we're extremely strong in the nuclear energy space. One of the areas that we all know is experiencing a renaissance is nuclear power, whether it be small modular reactors or baseload plants.
In order to advance Canada and the world, you need organizations like ours, which has the only undergraduate program in nuclear engineering, followed by master's and doctoral programs in nuclear engineering. We need that kind of specialized talent to be able to move research from the lab into SMRs that don't yet exist.
It's a really great example of how the federal government needs to invest in a technology so that we can have proof of concept here in Canada through CANDU technology or, indeed, other technologies of SMRs working in the field in Canada, and then begin to sell those assets abroad, which I have also been involved in, in terms of initial talk.
When we talk about our competitiveness on the world stage, it all comes back to how seriously we are taking research that will drive industry and industries that will drive international trade, and areas where we can be leaders with our Canadian presence and our footprint today, not areas that we aspire to be in. I would say those are also very important in this discussion, but it's in areas we already lead and that we don't leverage effectively where federal investments can help the ecosystem to move even more quickly.
You're quite right. At our institution, about 16% of our grad students are federally funded, which is actually a fairly high number in comparison to peers. It points to the real importance of funding our research and, of course, our professors. This is because, as I'm sure you've heard many times over, our professors are the ones who help the university provide RAships and TAships. Even more importantly, they provide opportunities and scholarships through their grants to be able to attract these people.
It's only when we combine federal scholarships and, potentially, provincial scholarships, which are fading in number, with institutional offers that are pulled from faculties' grants accounts that we can be competitive. As those grants accounts diminish in real dollars over time, our ability to attract students and keep them in Canada is significantly decreased.
Thank you to both of our witnesses today. It's fascinating testimony.
I'll be sharing my time with MP Turnbull.
Dr. Murphy, prior to your current role you were the dean of the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University. Now, of course, you're the president and vice-chancellor of Ontario Tech University.
Would you mind explaining to us what differences you've noticed, or how they affect applying for research and being favoured with research funding based on whether you're in a large city or a smaller community and the size of the educational institution?
:
I would say that my experience in three Ontario universities has been that it's less about being in a major city than it is the track record of that institution in terms of grants. The people who sit on granting agencies and review grants—as I have—are successful researchers. They have typically come from U15 schools traditionally. That expanded out to include more and more institutions as they became successful.
As you saw Toronto Metropolitan University—formerly Ryerson—become a university and come into its own, it won win more and more grants in time. I'm seeing the same thing at Ontario Tech. You have to prove yourself, establish yourself in larger partnerships, and then lead those partnerships, etc.
It's a long process to get to the top. It's not always the most efficient process. It's not always, to speak to Michelle Rempel Garner's question, based on the merits of who can do the work the most effectively as much as it is who's traditionally done the work.
It is really important to note that each university has its own niches it excels in. In my view, it's to be able to target those areas where it indeed can perform to its highest capacity.
Our ACE wind tunnel facility is one of a kind in the world. It is both geothermal and aerodynamic. This is the place where Silicon Valley and the rest of the world come to test their electric vehicles, their autonomous vehicles and everything from bicycles through to the Canadian ski team. This is as applied as research gets. This is where we see engineering colliding with human factors. Again, we have heard a lot of things that are outdated nomers in the testimony. Universities are as applied today as colleges are.
We are doing work that's at the cutting edge of where electric vehicles are going. One of the big issues with electric vehicles is noise. You take out the noise from an engine that we're all used to hearing. When you get an electric vehicle, the wind noise seems incredibly loud. One of the areas that we've been working with manufacturers hand in glove in, with our students and researchers all involved, is how you reduce wind noise in EVs to make it more comfortable in the cabin and for it to be less noisy in there. It's actually a very big issue when it comes to a buy decision.
We're also working on autonomous vehicles—
:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to return to today's topic of study, which is the concentration of research funding in Canada.
Mr. Cecil, I'll continue with you.
Would a rebalancing of research funding require us to stop making distinctions, particularly between colleges, CEGEPs, college technology transfer centres, as they are known in Quebec, or technology access centres in the rest of Canada, by comparing them to universities in terms of granting scholarships for certain programs where applied research is important, and by focusing more on the benefits for small and medium-sized businesses, and the local economy in particular?
:
I would agree entirely with that statement.
Levelling the playing field creates equity for the entire ecosystem. When we take a look at our stakeholders, that is the Canadian population. They're looking to all of us, as elected officials and officials inside the government's agencies, to be good stewards of the public purse and to ensure that the results we come up with on their behalf suit their needs.
Levelling the playing field between CEGEPs, colleges and universities, and creating eligibility and equity across a system so that we take an ecosystem approach, will benefit Canadians immensely.
To be bold, I believe this committee has an opportunity to make a generational impact on Canada's ability to compete at a global level by taking a very focused look at reimagining the federal funding ecosystem around research. If we were to become a global powerhouse of applied research—that is, research with impacts in terms of electric vehicles, as my esteemed colleague has said, or new forms of feeding the world—this would change the perception of Canadian research on a global level. This would have an impact for the entire 21st century.
:
I'm also a graduate of Red River College. We had a very strong tie with the business communities and that's still the case. It's great to have that kind of vision in the room, as I said.
Thank you both for your testimonies and for your thoughts on this study of distribution of federal government funding among Canada's post-secondary institutions. If there is additional information that we didn't get to, please submit it to the clerk.
Before we close, I remind colleagues that we have the study on Canada's Arctic in relation to climate change coming up. We need witness lists submitted by next Monday, April 22. If you can get those over to the clerk that would help him do his job.
Are we adjourned?.
Some hon. members: Agreed.
The Chair: Thank you very much.