INST Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON INDUSTRY, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

COMITÉ PERMANENT DE L'INDUSTRIE, DES SCIENCES ET DE LA TECHNOLOGIE

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Thursday, November 8, 2001

• 0908

[English]

The Chair (Ms. Susan Whelan (Essex, Lib.)): I will call the meeting to order pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), a study on the three federal granting agencies, peer review funding, and the Canada research chairs program.

We're very pleased to welcome here today from the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, Mr. Robert Giroux, the president and chief executive officer; Mr. Paul Davenport, president, University of Western Ontario; Ms. Bonnie Patterson, president, Trent University; Mr. David Barnard, president, University of Regina; and Mr. Tom Traves, president, Dalhousie University.

We're going to begin with Dr. Giroux, and then we'll turn it over to your colleagues.

Mr. Robert J. Giroux (President and Chief Executive Officer, Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada): Thank you, Madam Chair. I welcome this opportunity to continue the discussion we began with this committee last May regarding the ways and means of enhancing innovation capacity in Canadian universities.

AUCC read with interest your report of June 2001 and was pleased to note the committee's recognition of the central role of universities in the national innovation agenda. I'm joined today by four university presidents who will provide unique perspectives on the importance of ensuring universities are well resourced if they are to make their crucial contribution to this agenda.

[Translation]

Before I give them the floor, allow me to briefly note the conditions that will enable Canadian universities to work effectively with federal granting agencies and other funding partners.

• 0910

In seeking to advance our shared goal of expanding our national innovation capacity, research excellence must be encouraged and supported in all parts of the system, across all disciplines and in all regions of the country. Excellence has no predetermined address. To sustain and diversify our national innovation capacity, we must therefore nourish originality of thought and sustained commitment to support more researchers and graduate students, in more institutions, at more internationally competitive levels.

We believe that this commitment is essential if we are to meet the target of moving from 15th to 5th in GERD to GDP and thereby succeed in improving the quality of life and economic prosperity of Canadians in all regions of the country.

It is for this reason that AUCC advocated a policy framework that seeks to simultaneously enhance the international competitiveness and the research capacity of Canadian universities. Our overall objective insofar as the innovation agenda is concerned, is to ensure that Canadian universities across the country have the sustained ability to contribute to the innovation agenda according to their respective mission, institutional priorities and abilities. As you know from our previous appearance before this committee, AUCC believes that a federal commitment to the payment of the indirect costs of research, together with an initiative to build research capacity in smaller institutions, are crucial "first steps" in pursuit of this goal.

The payment of the indirect costs of research, according to a formula such as the one proposed by the ACST, is a prerequisite to redress Canadian universities' positioning on the international playing field. Key competitor nations including the U.S., the UK, Australia and Japan are already paying the indirect costs of the federal research they sponsor. This provides an unparalleled foundation from which to aggressively pursue a national innovation agenda.

More must also be done to foster and strengthen innovation capacity in smaller Canadian universities so that they can continue to strategically harness the innovation potential of the communities in which they are located. In advancing a new federal capacity building initiative, we acknowledge the need to recognize and build on the demonstrated flexibility of existing federal programs. The research capacity building initiative we propose also recognizes excellence as the fundamental criterion of funding allocation.

[English]

Once initiatives to address the indirect costs of research and research capacity building are in place, universities will be better positioned to continue to promote and support a wide range of research programs funded by the granting agencies.

As new research ideas continue to blossom, the innovation base is broadened and international success is increasingly achieved. The demand for research funding will grow exponentially. Indeed, the granting agencies are already reporting significant growth in demand due to the influx of new researchers in the system as universities begin the process of faculty renewal. To seize momentum and capture the benefits to Canada, significant and sustained increases in funding to the granting agencies is not only warranted but essential.

It is worth noting that despite shifting budget priorities following September 11, the U.S. Congress is staying the course with massive investments in university-based research. The U.S. will increase the budget of the National Institutes of Health by more than $3 billion U.S. next year and has put the national foundation on track to at least double its current funding levels by 2010. In light of our own national innovation agenda and target, Canada cannot afford to stand still.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I would like to ask—we sat in order here, and I hope it's agreeable with you—Tom Traves, the president of the University of Dalhousie, and also president of the Atlantic Association of Universities, to speak first. Dr. Paul Davenport, president of Western, and also the past chair of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, will go next; then Dr. Bonnie Patterson, president of Trent University; followed by Dr. David Barnard, president of Regina university.

Is that agreeable to you, Madam Chair?

The Chair: That's fine.

Dr. Traves.

• 0915

Mr. Tom Traves (President, Dalhousie University, and Chair, Atlantic Association of Universities): Thank you, Madam Chair, and let me express my appreciation for this opportunity to participate in this discussion and presentation.

As you heard, I am the president of Dalhousie University and I'm also the chair of the Atlantic Association of Universities. If I can, allow me to provide a brief context for my remarks, in a sense growing out of the dual positions I hold.

Dalhousie University is essentially a research university, with a full range of academic programs at all levels, including a host of PhD programs.

Characteristically in our region, however, most of our universities are small, undergraduate institutions. We have a broad mix. We have 17 universities in Atlantic Canada serving a multiplicity of communities through 21 different campuses spread across the region. The vast majority of these institutions, with the exception, I would say, of Dalhousie, the University of New Brunswick, and Memorial University, are all smaller institutions, as I've indicated, primarily undergraduate in their focus.

Another characteristic of the region is that we attract a substantial number of out-of-province and out-of-region students to our campuses. For example, at Dalhousie, fully 40% of our student body come to us from outside Nova Scotia. This is very unusual in Canada, and from our point of view, we regard that as one of the positive aspects of the educational experience, that students are able to meet other students from across the country and around the globe as well.

Because of the geographical distribution across the region of so many campuses, our universities are very closely connected to community development needs. This has always been true, but its importance has been reinforced of late because of the knowledge economy and the need to transform the economic structure of Atlantic Canada. Our universities play a critical role in this respect.

We have an especially large responsibility in this respect, because within our region we have an industrial structure characterized by small and medium-sized firms primarily, with limited capacity to do research and development. So whereas in the national scope universities account for about 25% of all funded research, in Atlantic Canada we account for about 45% of all funded research, and the private sector is much smaller as a result. There's a large responsibility on us to fulfill our research mission if the region is to transform its economic structure and move forward in the knowledge economy.

In our region—and I'd like to emphasize this—there's very close connection between our institutions, small and big. This is especially so when you look at the academic path of students. Many of the graduate students at institutions like Dalhousie, Memorial, and UNB come from smaller schools in the region, so there's a very close relationship in our mind between the strength of the preparation they receive in the smaller institutions and their moving forward into the larger research institutions. As well, faculty members at the smaller institutions are commonly appointed to the graduate programs in the larger universities, where they have the opportunity to supervise research and teach graduate students. So we have a very closely integrated system.

The result of this is that we have across the region a common strength, whether we're a big institution or a small institution, in the research enterprise in the region. I think there's a collective recognition we have expressed on many occasions, both to our provincial governments and to federal representatives, that we have a huge stake in the future of the research and innovation agendas in Canada.

In that context then, our needs fundamentally are similar in character to those of universities across the country. We all have, from a regional perspective, some nuanced differences, but if you were to stand back half a pace, I think it would be fair to say, certainly from Atlantic Canada's perspective, that we fundamentally have the same kinds of needs at our universities as do universities in other parts of Canada. Those needs are to enhance the human resources we have available to ensure that we have the capacity to teach our students and to carry forward the research agenda of our institutions in our region—and so programs like the Canada research chairs play a vital role in that respect—to enhance the equipment we have available, particularly in the sciences and the medical community, to carry forward the research we're engaged in—and programs like the Canada Foundation for Innovation are vital in that regard for the support they provide—and of course to enhance the direct cost of research we receive from the national granting councils.

• 0920

Overall, and in general, I would say, across the region there's strong support for all these programs. Everybody has their own perspective on this rule or that rule in regard to the programs, but fundamentally, bottom line, we all believe these are vital national programs that significantly benefit our region.

Concerning our needs, if we look to the future and to the gaps that exist for us, first of all, with respect to the indirect costs of research, as the research agenda grows and as the support of particularly the federal government grows—happily, and it's highly welcomed—this imposes substantial new costs on our institutions. Every time we get additional support, this calls for us to back up the additional research grant or the new professor or support the new equipment with institutional funds. At the moment, no one is giving us that support, and that draws down on our institutional resources and fundamentally takes away from our students' needs.

Secondly—and I think this is a national problem, but it's keenly felt in our region because we have so many older universities—we have a crumbling campus infrastucture, which we have been unable to maintain adequately. Again, as we move forward, taking advantage of all of these new programs, the limitations of our physical plant become all the more apparent. So we have a strong need for some kind of infrastructure program to support campus renewal in a wide range of areas.

Those are my comments on this general agenda, and I thank you for the opportunity to speak to this issue.

Finally, I have to offer an apology. I have an airplane to catch a little later in the morning, and I'm going to have to depart the hearings at about 10:30 a.m. So I apologize in advance for slipping away.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Traves.

It's okay. We'll excuse you if we're not finished by then.

Dr. Davenport, please.

Mr. Paul Davenport (President, University of Western Ontario; Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada): Thank you.

Let me begin by thanking this committee, thanking the Government of Canada, for the extraordinary vision that underlies the innovation agenda. We live in a knowledge-based economy. Our future prosperity as Canadians and the kinds of employment that our young people can aspire to are critically dependent on the investments we make now in research. Nowhere are those investments more important than in our universities.

So we're on the right track; the innovation agenda is the right one. Let me salute in particular the investments we've made during the last five years in the granting councils, so that we cover the direct operating costs of research; in the Canada Foundation for Innovation, so that we improve our physical infrastructure; and in the Canada research chairs program, so that we're assisted in recruiting outstanding new researchers.

What's the next step? What do we need to do now after all those investments? I'm convinced that to get the full benefit of those investments, we need one more step, and it's the indirect costs of research. You've heard our president describe this program as it exists in our major competitors, in the United States, Britain, and Australia. The reinforcing nature of the indirect costs, the way they leverage the direct costs of research, is well understood in all those countries. The system is working well. We think there are enormous benefits to be had by introducing that system into Canada.

I personally like the approach taken in the ACST report, where the leveraging effect is modified according to the size of the university and the leveraging is particularly great in the smaller universities. I think that makes sense in our context. But as you'll hear this morning, all our universities, large and small, have this same need.

• 0925

I want to describe how that need works at my university.

At the University of Western Ontario we have a very fine faculty of medicine. They bring in tens of millions of dollars in research grants every year. We do not currently receive the indirect costs of research on most of those grants because they're coming from the federal government. We nonetheless have to pay those costs. We have to provide space. We have to provide heat, light, and power. The addition of researchers on our campus means we have to improve our computing infrastructure and our libraries. We pay all those costs by taxing the general university teaching budget.

We actually put that number into our annual budget and we put it on the web. Our budget is a public document. We estimate that number to be about $10 million right now, that we need to put into the overhead costs and other costs in the faculty of medicine just to run it as an averagely funded faculty in the country. I'm not talking here about a faculty that receives greater than average funding.

Our students understand that, and for that reason they are strongly in favour of the indirect costs of research. If my student body president, Mike Lawless, were here with me today, he would be saying the same thing: the students want those indirect costs because it will end this diversion of money out of the teaching budget. His national association, CASA, has spoken out strongly in favour of the indirect costs. So this is an issue that unites my campus. Students, faculty, and staff are all in favour of this program.

It has a special urgency now, though, that I hope you all understand. As we go through the extraordinary period of retirements of the next ten years, as the people my age and older retire, who were hired in that first baby boom of the 1960s and 1970s as young faculty, what we're seeing at campus after campus is.... Take an example of a faculty where ten faculty members leave and ten are recruited; I'm not even talking about an expanding faculty. The ten faculty members who leave will be doing a lot less research than the ten who come in. The ten faculty members who come in, at an average university, in science, medicine, engineering, will all need space. They'll all have equipment grants. They'll put tremendous demands on the universities just by the rollover from retiring faculty to the new ones. We're seeing it again and again.

You've heard the same statement from Tom Brzustowski of NSERC with regard to the demand for research grants. That demand for research grants translates in my world into demands for space and computing power, and so on.

How do we solve that? How do we keep the infrastructure up to date with the demands? We do it with the indirect costs of research.

So, again, thank you for the innovation agenda. The environment at Canadian universities now is completely different from what it was ten years ago. Ten years ago, an outstanding young researcher had to ask the question, do I have a future in Canada, or do I have to go elsewhere to succeed as an outstanding researcher? We can look them in the eye now and say, yes, indeed you do have a future.

But let's keep that future bright. Let's keep the innovation agenda rolling with the indirect costs of research.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Davenport.

Ms. Patterson, please.

Ms. Bonnie Patterson (President, Trent University; Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada): Thank you, Madam Chair.

Let me contextualize my remarks, and I will try to be brief for fear of being repetitive of my colleagues who come from much larger institutions.

We're the second smallest university in our province, and amongst the smallest in Canada. We're predominately undergraduate, with 5,000 students and approximately 200 graduate students. We are exclusively in the arts and sciences fields in our university, with a predominance of interdisciplinary study. We are research-intensive as a small institution and rank somewhere in the order of 30th among 92 universities in the country. That's a fairly unique position to be in as a small institution.

Here are a few comments of importance to us.

First, fundamental to smaller institutions is research excellence. We must have the ability to test ourselves against the highest standards of research performance both nationally and internationally, and so the processes in place to do that are critically important to us in terms of our success.

Many small universities in Canada find themselves with two particular situations to deal with. We are typically not in large urban settings, and we are of critical importance to our local and regional economies but also to the social and cultural environment in the communities within which we live and serve.

• 0930

The second factor for many of us is that we are largely focused on the social sciences and humanities. At Trent, for example, our focus is approximately 60% in that area. Therefore, access to resources through such granting councils as SSHRC becomes fundamental to the ability of our universities to compete, not just regionally and nationally but internationally.

In terms of capacity building for research, many of us find it is critically important to our success to be very niche-focused. We need to develop critical mass in particular areas. Some of the programs the federal government has put in place in fact are now allowing us to establish excellence at a critical mass level.

Among the top five reasons why students choose to come to universities, you will find the research excellence of faculty is a main consideration for young people today. That applies to small universities in the same way it does to medium and large.

What we have experienced, through being able to pursue a number of programs made available through federal support, is that success breeds success. Important to us is the ability to resource indirect issues within our institutions, so the indirect costs of research become fundamental. We will never build the largest and most significant libraries on our campuses, but the ability, through information technology, to access resources in libraries around the world that are now available in digital form, for example, is a critical success factor.

Our ability to service our laboratories so that travel is diminished, in terms of accessing physical facilities for research by both our students and our faculty, is important. We typically are less financially endowed. We have less financial flexibility, and yet we have the same needs of infrastructure support and indirect cost of research as larger institutions. As we are more successful, one of our pressure points, of course, is research and grants administration. That's simply an example of what indirect cost coverage would allow us to do more appropriately.

I will stop there, since my colleague has other comments that I think will complement those I've made, and simply thank you for spending the time, effort, energy, and intellectual power on what are very important issues to us as a nation.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Patterson.

Dr. Barnard.

Mr. David Barnard (President, University of Regina): Thank you.

I represent the University of Regina, but I think I also represent other universities that have a commitment to innovative regional, social, cultural, and economic development. I'll contextualize my university in a slightly different way.

We've been carrying out an extensive planning exercise over the last couple of years, resulting in a set of research themes that we think are appropriate for the realities of being a medium-scale institution situated in the middle of the Canadian prairies. We've been renewing our faculty aggressively, so by next summer between 40% and 50% of our faculty will have been with us for less than five years.

Our overall research and scholarly activity has been growing faster than the national average, which helps us to contribute to innovation and enhance the region's competitiveness, and we hope our country's competitiveness. We've planned and undertaken a comprehensive set of building and renovation projects to help us cope with these other changes. We're attracting more students.

We're catching up with our colleagues in other parts of the country, in some respects. For example, we're just putting in place an office of technology transfer, funded in partnership with the city. We've undertaken a list of innovative research projects that we think are aligned with the specific needs of our province.

In that context, there are several principles that are important to us. First, I would stress quality assessment. We do not expect support for mediocre work, but we do need support for high-quality innovative work that matters in our province.

Second, we have regional and non-urban concerns. For example, in Saskatchewan we are geographically large, but in terms of population, very small. An increasing percentage of the population is aboriginal. This is a reality we address through a partnership with the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, but it is a reality that underlies our program development and our choice of priorities.

Third is capacity building. It's been said that whereas in the past cities were characterized by the presence of cathedrals, now cities are often characterized by the presence of universities as centres of innovation. Those of us who are working to build cultural, economic, and social development capacity across the country need to see support for a range of activities, including regional support.

• 0935

The fourth principle for us is funding of new researchers. As I mentioned, we've had a massive turnover in our faculty. These people place tremendous demands on the university, as my colleagues have already mentioned, and they place demands on the granting councils.

It's important that these new younger faculty members, as my colleagues have already stressed, who are generally more research-active than those whom they replaced and thus will contribute to innovation and productivity in the country, be given support. In particular, it's essential that they be given the support they will need to attract graduate students and train more researchers, who will contribute to the future of the country.

The next point I would stress is funding for the social sciences and the humanities. I know the focus here is on industry, science and technology, but I want to stress the complementarity of these issues that contribute mutually to intellectual vigour. Also, to give an example, one of the most innovative projects at my university is a collaboration, between colleagues in software engineering and colleagues in our film and video department, to build a studio laboratory. As a result of that, we're building partnerships with the local provincial film industry and are participating together in the development of a sound stage that will support the development of local industry even further. That has only resulted from the collaboration that was possible between the arts and the sciences.

With my colleagues, I'd also stress the indirect costs of research as being important to us. I've mentioned that we have a comprehensive series of changes in our facilities. We have had to, like our sister institutions, provide space, capacity for managing and reporting, equipment, and databases far beyond what our growth in student numbers has generated because of the growth in the research and innovation enterprise.

I would also mention that even for relatively smaller and younger universities like ours—our campus is only about four decades old—accumulated deferred maintenance is an issue because many of our buildings were built with expected lifetimes of something like 30 to 35 years for major building systems. Even younger universities, like the University of Regina, have come to the end of those initial several decades and need to renovate, in the context of higher expectations for health and safety.

Again, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to present some of these perspectives from a smaller regional university. I think they mesh in many ways with the concerns of my colleagues elsewhere.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Barnard.

We'll now turn to questions, and we'll begin with Madam Girard-Bujold.

[Translation]

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold (Jonquière, BQ): Thank you, Madam Chair.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great interest that I have come here today to the Industry Committee. I am from a region where there is a university, l'Université du Québec in Chicoutimi. You are here to talk about the smaller universities and the granting programs of the federal government, a subject I am particularly interested in. There are many issues I'd like you to comment on.

I don't know whether most of you represent regional universities. You probably don't represent large institutions such as the University of Montreal. In our region, people feel that smaller universities are penalized by the granting system used by the federal government to encourage innovation. First, it would increase their workload, which is already too heavy. They don't have the required facilities. They might have the researchers they should have, but it would mean asking them... They also say that the indirect costs of research, given the kind of programs now offered by the federal government, are very high.

Do you think that there should be, among these new programs, some which target smaller universities, with appropriate budgets to meet their needs? It's my first question.

Mr. Robert Giroux: If I may, madame, I'm going to answer and then, I'll ask my colleagues to add a few comments.

You raised two important points. You mentioned that indirect costs are very high. As you've heard, because each of my colleagues said it in no uncertain terms, financing the indirect costs flowing from the research grants which are provided is important.

• 0940

A study of those indirect costs has been done by the Advisory Council on Science and Technology, a body accountable to the government. It strongly recommended to fund indirect costs, but it also underlined that proportionately, indirect costs place a much heavier burden on smaller universities than on bigger ones. This is why it recommended a formula whereby the smaller universities could get as much as 90 % financing. Why did the Council make such a recommendation? To recognize the problem you pointed out, and that's a big step in the right direction.

Second, people realized that the smaller universities... You know your university better than me, but I know that since it's a regional institution, it's particularly well positioned to work in the area of aluminum, natural resources, environment, water quality, etc. This university, if it were appropriately positioned, could become a centre of excellence by doing research in those areas. It's already a centre of excellence, but it needs a stronger support.

This is why we suggested a program that would target smaller universities. They would submit a plan to strengthen their capacity in one area and would outline their needs. This program could be available to finance the capacity-building side of university research.

Do you want to add something, Paul?

M. Paul Davenport: Madam Girard-Bujold, I was an economist at McGill for 16 years. I was also a member of the Council of Universities. I worked with researchers in Trois-Rivières on regional development. Joseph Chicha was at the helm at that time. As you no doubt know, in Trois-Rivières, excellent research is being done in niche areas, for example, in regional development.

So I think it's possible to be both small and excellent. I am convinced, as the president just said, that in Trois-Rivières, people need as much money to finance indirect costs as at the University of Montreal. These universities are not the same size, but their needs are the same, and excellence-building will require the same support in Trois-Rivières.

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold: I am happy to hear that. Do you think that the present peer review process penalizes researchers in the smaller universities who ask for a grant? I agree with the principle of peer review process, but do those experts, when they review the applications, really try to find out what is going on in the regions? Do they recognize the importance of our regions? Do they thoroughly analyse regional needs? It seems to me that on those selection committees, there never is anyone coming from the regions. It's always people from large urban centres, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, who are not really aware of the importance of the research that's being done in the regions, in our universities. Don't you agree?

Mr. Robert Giroux: If you don't mind, Madam Chair, I'm going to ask Ms. Patterson to answer the question, since she is president of a regional university.

[English]

Ms. Bonnie Patterson: Thank you. You're asking some very important questions. I started my career at a very large institution, spent 18 years at a medium-sized one, and am now in a very small one, so I can appreciate some of the challenges you outlined for your university.

For me the reality is that we need both successful large and successful small institutions in Canada. More recently, some specific targeting within programs has been set that has been extremely helpful. Some of the proposals Mr. Giroux has referenced that are being discussed now and are part of the consultation process can continue to help in that regard.

• 0945

One of the fundamental problems we face as smaller institutions, however, is that when we meet the test of excellence and when we submit proposals, whether it's to granting councils or within other types of programs, the level of resources available to support those excellent proposals is often the problem, as opposed to built-in biases. Our experience has been that we have many of our faculty, particularly newer faculty in smaller institutions, who do meet the test of excellence, who do meet the competitiveness of the evaluation of the import and nature of their activity. But when the line is drawn and the money runs out, you have many of the newer individuals below the line, as opposed to above the line, not in quality but in the resources available to support.

So I think there are two components to this. One is getting the structure of the programs right. I think we've done much to get there, and there's still more that can be done. But the second thing is fundamentally the level of resources available. And the experience of our faculty would be that this is as limiting to them as some of the other structural issues, to which you refer.

Mr. Robert Giroux: Madam Chair, two other of my colleagues would like to comment on that, if that is agreeable, Dr. Barnard and then Dr. Traves.

Mr. David Barnard: Thank you. I address this with some trepidation, having studied in Toronto and Vancouver, which were mentioned in the introduction to the question, and then worked at Queen's for some years.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: All the small schools.

Mr. David Barnard: All the small schools.

The University of Regina is quite different. I think the government needs to be careful in balancing policy objectives and using sometimes complementary tools to achieve complementary objectives. As I mentioned, we see a need for building capacity and for recognizing priorities that might have greater importance in some regions sitting in Regina than perhaps some would have in some of the larger centres. But I hope we would not move away from a strong focus on quality and excellence as the basis for doing work in this country. As the president has already described, it is possible to have programs that build on a broad recognition of excellence, but also recognize that there can be differential demands in some classes of institution.

So we need capacity-building. We need regional priorities to be recognized, but I hope not at the expense of, as others have already said, quality as being the underlying foundation. I think my own institution's experience in this regard is encouraging. As I think President Patterson's institution could say the same, in competition with the larger institutions in some of the recent programs, we have been successful in attracting grants for what we consider to be very high-quality research in areas that are of significance to our region.

Mr. Tom Traves: I'd like to respond and add a very specific example that I think speaks directly to your concerns, with which I am very sympathetic. My university hosts one of the smallest medical schools in Canada, and for many years we felt that we were less competitive when we went through the peer granting process at the former Medical Research Council than researchers who came from large medical schools at large institutions.

We never felt that we were discriminated against in any fashion, but we recognized that there was a reality, namely, that we would build a proposal based on, essentially, a good idea and put it forward and we would be asked, well, how much have you done already and what's your track record on this topic? We would be in competition with scholars from other universities that were better endowed in major metropolitan centres, who not only put forward their good idea, but had already invested into the project a substantial amount of money that they had received from their institution or from their province.

So when you looked at the two proposals, any sensible person would say that the proposal coming from the other institutions was stronger. They were further down the track in terms of doing the work. They had demonstrated more capacity in this area. And, it seems to me, from the perspective of good stewardship of research money being spent on behalf of the public, any reasonable person would have invested it in the other school. My colleagues recognized that. They never complained about the rules. They just wanted essentially an opportunity to compete on a level playing field.

• 0950

Happily for us, the Medical Research Council a number of years ago instituted a program, which they called I believe the research partnerships program. This set aside a designated amount of what was essentially seed money—small grants—for a designated number of smaller institutions that allowed us to invest in our good ideas.

So when we eventually did go forward to compete with scholars at much bigger and better funded universities, we had the same pre-investment in our project and had made the same progress as they had. So we were able to compete on a level playing field. Significantly our research grant results went up substantially as a result of that kind of support. I think it's that kind of program idea that's built into some of the suggestions we've presented.

It's not a matter here of a bias in the system, which is fundamentally founded on quality and excellence. I think those are values that we absolutely have to preserve. The issue is, how do we make sure that different institutions with different capacities are able to compete with one another effectively? That's the focus we've presented. We want to focus on that side rather than somehow drag down everybody because we have a system that has a bias against excellence and against competitiveness.

[Translation]

The Chair: Ms. Girard-Bujold, the floor is yours.

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold: Mr. Traves, you said earlier that you have a regional program. Was it established with the province or in the context of a federal program, to enable you to compete with other Canadian universities on a level playing field. Is that what you meant?

In the context of this program, you have set regional priorities for your smaller universities. You said earlier that there are 17 universities, two of them small, and 21 campuses in Atlantic Canada. So you want to integrate all these elements to be more competitive at the national level. Did I get you right?

I have a question about that. Should all regional universities, which you represent, take the same approach to get more recognition, so that in the peer review process, people realize how important regional priorities are for the development of a particular region?

[English]

Mr. Tom Traves: You asked two questions. On the first question this was a national program funded by the Medical Research Council. The structure of that program was that they made a certain sum of money available and required matching provincial funds, which our province stepped forward to do. So this created a substantial new investment pool for the kinds of projects I described earlier. But it came initially from a national program. I think it had a very powerful leverage effect on the province in terms of encouraging them to invest in this fashion.

I would say that although the provinces are understandably occasionally miffed about who sets priorities around these matters, in this case they were quite happy to see a federal investment and stepped forward to ensure there was more money in the system from both sides for medical research in our area. So this was I think a very successful instance of that kind of situation.

With respect to setting priorities, research focus, and so on within our region, we are provincial institutions. We are provincially funded. We recognize that we have both a provincial and a regional responsibility. It's obviously made more complex by virtue of the fact that we operate not only within provincial jurisdictions but also have a sense of the larger regional context.

That said, we have worked very cooperatively with institutions across the region and indeed across the country. Most particularly the recent Atlantic Investment Fund, which is now in place in our region, has explicitly identified the need for inter-institutional partnerships and regional cooperation. So there's a substantial investment that has been made by our universities in developing the organizational ability to work much more closely with one another than has ever existed before.

• 0955

We also recognize the need to focus. My university is the largest in the Maritimes, but we are, by comparison to other major institutions across the country, a medium-sized university. We only have 14,000 students in comparison to institutions with two, three, or four times as many students. So we recognize the need to focus both inside the institution and inside the region.

As we developed plans in the face of the opportunities presented by the Atlantic Investment Fund, our universities came together and identified a handful of regional priorities. These were worked out in the first instance between the universities, but obviously also in close consultation with provincial officials and with federal officials through ACOA and Industry Canada, so that there was a consensus that emerged in the region that these are areas—they were fairly obvious areas—that relate to the structure of our economy and to the kinds of opportunities that are now present in the knowledge economy. So it's a merging of the local and the particular against the general opportunities that are available. It's been I think generally a successful development for us.

The Chair: Thank you.

Merci, Madame.

Mr. McTeague, please.

Mr. Dan McTeague (Pickering—Ajax—Uxbridge, Lib.): Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good morning. I guess some of you have alluded to the issue of the research chairs, and I too have an interest. This is obviously not your first time before the committee on this subject. We've written a report not too long ago—last June, I believe—in which comments were made about our concern with respect to the allocation formula.

We're a year into this program. There have been objections raised by others but also by the Canadian Association of University Teachers with respect to the shortcomings—it might create a have and have not scenario. I respect the fact that many of you are from smaller universities, so you may have more to comment on this.

But now that we've been here with this program for well over a year, I'm wondering if you could address the issue of allocation of the chairs—whether or not the concerns that we initially saw in the year 2000 were indeed valid, whether your university feels any modifications ought to be made, and what those modifications ought to be.

Mr. Tom Traves: I think I could start. My region was certainly one that was very anxious about this. As I indicated, we have many small institutions. There was a great anxiety at the start of the program that we would essentially be raided—that the best people at our institutions would disappear into the better-funded, larger institutions across the country. That has not happened.

At my university we've lost one person. But at the same time we've attracted people from other institutions. If you just see this in the context of the normal movement by people in terms of their careers, it fundamentally has not proven to be the kind of anxiety we worried about.

The other element here that I think has worked out very well—in a sense it goes back to the comments I made to your colleague a moment ago—is that the smaller institutions recognized that they needed to focus the efforts of the smaller number of chairs. They've done, I think, an excellent job.

So, for instance, if I can cite one example, we obviously have a large interest in our region in oil and gas development, given the offshore developments. My colleagues at St. Francis Xavier University received, I believe, six or seven chairs. They're an undergraduate institution of about 3,500 to 4,000 students. They made it an institutional priority that they would use all of those chairs to focus on building capacity in this area.

At the same time, at my institution, which has PhD level programs in a host of areas connected to oil and gas development, we also made it a priority, not to use all of our chairs but a substantial number in this area. We worked very closely with them, so that we would develop complementary activities that would mesh with one another and ensure a regional capacity.

I think that's an example of very creative and disciplined use of this program. It has worked out very well for all concerned. So if you consulted the president of a smaller university like St. FX, that individual would feel very pleased with the outcome of that program.

• 1000

Mr. Paul Davenport: In the Canada research chairs program you have an extraordinary success story on your hands. Mr. McTeague is right that the original announcement caused some concerns about raiding and disadvantages for certain kinds of institutions. With our experience so far, those chairs are making an enormous positive effect right across the country.

They're doing two things. First, they're allowing the recruitment of outstanding people we could not otherwise recruit. Secondly, and more important, they are requiring us to identify and build our strengths as individual institutions.

At my university the chairs have a real effect on our culture in helping us step back and build on those strengths by asking the following questions. Where in the social sciences are we the best? Where in the humanities are we the best? Where in other areas are we the best? They are saying get the critical mass so that we can compete with the best in North America and the world.

Our finance minister says it very clearly: in this knowledge-based economy, being second best, being mediocre, is not good enough. I think Mr. Martin is exactly right. We need to build areas of strength at some universities, at ones like mine, at the very biggest in the country, where we're competitive with the best. I think the chairs help us do that.

The chairs program has worked out very well, and it's a program you can all be very proud of.

Ms. Bonnie Patterson: I would echo many of the comments made by my colleagues, and I would add a couple of other points. First of all, one of our experiences with the program is that where there can be flexibility with the chairs, the happier and easier it is in some particular disciplines to address issues. As we see some of our highest-end researchers approaching retirement, the ability, for example, to use a senior-awarded chair in two particular areas as junior chairs has been very helpful in our case.

I would speak to the structure of the program being fine as we're moving forward. Yes, we've had some movement of people and we've lost one to a larger institution. We've gained others. That's the reality of faculty mobility and competitiveness, but the opportunity for some flexibility in the context of your strategic plan, your specific foci for the chairs, is important.

We have also learned, however, that the chairs program does raise two or three other issues that are terribly important for us.

We have been fortunate in establishing early CRC chairs to now recognize the magnet effect in those chairs of attracting post-doctorates. So our capability, for example, to support post-doctorates, as a smaller institution, from a resource point of view, is not at the level of other institutions. The CRC program does point to some other issues that we now have to face and try to find a way to deal with them.

Another example of a challenge in a smaller institution is that the CRC chairs provide a particular capability for the start-up of a faculty member in a program that is going to move to another level of depth and breadth. Yet for some of your faculty members who may be equal or parallel in research strength and teaching focus, they don't have that same opportunity. So part of what has emerged for us, as a smaller institution, is additional good challenges, but challenges from a resource point of view nonetheless.

Mr. David Barnard: I would echo all of the positive things my colleagues have said. I think this is an example where different policy objectives were accommodated within a program. It started as a program to build on recognized quality and it had a minor modification to provide some building of capacity.

At my university, which has benefited from that, we're being very careful with the use of our 11 chairs, but we've used these to attract people around whom we will rebuild.

At the moment—and I don't want to give too many details here—we're actually attempting to bring someone to Canada from another country around whom we will rebuild one of our aging departments.

• 1005

Without the resource attraction of the chair and its support, the university would have to put together some such package on our own, which would be a stretch for us.

So I echo the comments. I think the chairs program presents challenges, but it is a success.

Mr. Dan McTeague: I have no further questions, Madam Chair.

The Chair: Ms. Torsney.

Ms. Paddy Torsney (Burlington, Lib.): Dr. Patterson, you mentioned that one of the top five rankings for choosing a university was quality of research. That surprised me a little, because I went to a big institution. I tell students all the time to go to a place where you will in fact get really good teaching, because that's more important.

I am a business graduate and I tell them all to go into the humanities and then do an MBA.

I loved my education, but I think there's another way to do it.

I also tell them that travelling across Canada to other schools is very important because that's part of the experience as well. Trent and Dalhousie are definitely on my list, and I didn't go to either one of those.

I'm concerned that the more we focus on the research side of things and the more we talk about taking $10 million of our teaching budget to support the research side, the more we're in some really bizarre competitive race and we're not actually teaching students. The professor who really inspires and teaches well doesn't participate in this race, and they are at a disadvantage.

I'd love to know how you would address that.

The second thing is that I wonder sometimes who is driving and what the process is to figure out where things will be funded. It is good that Peter Adams came into the room because of course he is a fine professor from a great university.

We've travelled in the Arctic, and there's one guy in Canada who does Arctic research. He's probably over 70 at this point.

Mr. Peter Adams (Peterborough, Lib.): No, I'm not.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: No, not you; the other guy at Guelph.

Rather than attracting the most profitable things and the things you can parlay into lots of other research dollars with private corporations, provincial governments, or whatever is the latest priority, does anyone sit down and ask, what's the future for the country? Who the heck is doing Arctic research? What are the things that need to be done in Canada? Who can compete to do those? How do you build up that capacity? As you see more and more people retiring, who is really looking to make sure we're funding the things we should be funding? That may not be sexy right now, but the environment in the north is going to be sexy at some point, hopefully.

Mr. David Barnard: There are a number of questions there. I'd like to respond to a couple of them. I sense some eagerness among the other—

Ms. Paddy Torsney: We have them all agitated.

Mr. David Barnard: I note that the questioner was educated at McGill. I don't want to draw any conclusions from that.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: It's the only one you didn't go to.

Mr. David Barnard: There is a reasonable correlation between good teaching and good research. You almost pose a dichotomy, which I think is a false dichotomy.

It would be interesting to compare anecdotal experience, but my own experience was that I was turned on intellectually by an excellent teacher who was also one of the foremost researchers in the department in which he was teaching. I did not realize that until after becoming excited by his teaching. Many others can tell similar stories.

I know from my own experience as a department head and administrator in many capacities that sometimes our very best teachers are also our very best researchers. It is unusual to find people at the leading edge of challenging students intellectually who are not challenged intellectually themselves and who are active as scholars in their discipline. It can happen, but I don't think it's the majority experience.

I would like to respond to one of the other aspects of what you said. Who is looking at things that are important? Many of our universities are responding to things that are important for the country and for our regions—energy, for example.

• 1010

We don't work in the north, but we certainly, in Saskatchewan, work in a province where there are huge reserves, untapped reserves, of heavy oil under the surface of the ground. These are worth, potentially, billions of dollars and potentially tens of thousands of jobs.

We are also in a province that produces a large amount of its electricity by burning low-grade coal that produces very dirty emissions. One of our research initiatives is a partnership with the federal government, the provincial government, and a number of private sector firms to recapture carbon dioxide from flue gas emissions in the large power plants in the province and to sequester this underground in existing large oil deposits. This apparently has the wonderful benefit that you can take something you don't want in the atmosphere, put it back in the ground, and get out from the ground, by forcing carbon dioxide in, heavy oil.

We're involved, on the south side of the province, in a partnership on a project that is the largest project in the world on this. And while my own training is in computer science and theology...I'm not a petroleum engineer, but my colleagues who are tell me that if there is a silver bullet in technology, we may be reaching for it here.

I only cite this as one example. I think I could give others of my own university's pursuits and I think my colleagues could give many of theirs. And the president could doubtless cite examples across the country.

I don't think universities are just striving to do things that are glitzy and attract other dollars. I think, as President Davenport said, we're trying to assess our strengths, and often those strengths are conditioned by the regional realities and regional priorities we responded to.

The Chair: Does everybody want to respond?

Dr. Patterson.

Ms. Bonnie Patterson: Thank you.

I have a certain empathy for your comments, having been a former dean of business and now being responsible for a liberal arts and sciences institution, which I'm delighted to be at.

Let me amplify a little bit on the comment about students' interests in working with top-level researchers. Notice I use the term “top five”. And I think you're absolutely right that right at the top of the list is good teachers, followed by the reputation of very strong academic programs. Third is access to professors, and fourth is working with high-class researchers. So in the cluster of what is important to students, research features quite prominently.

We have an example at our institution that perhaps is the opposite of the worry—rather a wonderful outcome—in that our Canadian studies program, which is one of three areas where we have a depth and breadth through to the PhD level, actually spawned, in an interdisciplinary way, both our native studies program and our environmental sciences program. So the way interdisciplinarity works quite often at institutions does begin to address some of the worries you spoke to about highly focused areas.

For me, it's very much about balancing. And given the resource base that we all work from in these times, what is so important is to not only find those opportunities where you can leverage additional resources through partnerships or developments where they make sense, but also balance your ability to support other areas where the partnerships are not so easily going to be there. That is so true of many areas of social science and humanities. It's not as easy to find the private sector partner that's going to support that type of research. So it's about how we balance those components. And that's a very big part of what we do through the use of not only operating and research resources, but also through the resources we put behind our fundraising efforts and so on. So we do strive for that.

What research has helped us do, however, is become very focused, and it has helped us decide where we're going to make certain types of investments, both in the research and teaching side. I think the way the synergy works between the two is so clear when you see from students and hear from students what excites them, how a professor excites the student in the classroom. What the professor is excited about is often what generates new ideas, new thinking structures, new ways of analytically approaching problem-solving. Quite frankly, the research side of what most faculty do excites them. For some that's research around pedagogy and how they teach in their particular disciplines, but for others it is their discipline itself, and so again it is an issue of balance for us.

• 1015

The Chair: Thank you, Dr. Patterson. Dr. Davenport.

Mr. Paul Davenport: I won't repeat the excellent statements my colleagues have made. On the balance between teaching and research, you're seeing us on a research issue. If you were to come on my campus, you'd find that the administration was giving an awful lot of speeches, doing an awful lot of writing, about the importance of good teaching.

You mentioned a competitive race. We're in a competitive system now, but it operates both on research and in student recruitment. So we're working very hard to have the very best programs we can have for undergraduates, and the very best teachers, in order to recruit the very best students. And we're held accountable for it. Every student is allowed to fill out a form rating the professor on every course, and we put the results of those on the web so that everybody can see them, every student. It's like the old course reviews, except we've now automated that and it's up on the web.

The Chair: I wouldn't put those on the web.

Mr. Paul Davenport: So we take this very seriously. I don't want you to get the wrong picture here. We're not here because we're favouring research over teaching; we're here because we want to have excellent universities, and excellent universities require both excellence in teaching and in research.

In terms of your second question, though, about whether we're driven just by who's handing out dollars, absolutely not. That is one of the great strengths of our Canadian system, that our institutions have a degree of autonomy and our faculty have a degree of autonomy that allow the individual faculty member to do research on issues of interest to them. So we have great researchers in our centre for theory and criticism looking at literature and culture around the world, understanding Canadian culture by looking at others. We have wonderful researchers in the philosophy of science looking at how you understand what Newton's revolution or Einstein's revolution really meant and how do we know what we know, stretching all the way out into cosmology. Finally, another example, a very practical one, is we have a very active centre for the study of violence against women and children, where we're tied into community groups trying to help them deal with what is an urgent social problem.

None of those areas were ever driven by external research grants; they came out of the interests of our professors and the interests of their students. The great thing about our Canadian system is that we have enough autonomy among our faculty and universities that we can have this interest-driven research that often is far more valuable in the long run than research that has an immediate commercial application.

The Chair: Thank you. Dr. Traves.

Mr. Tom Traves: I'll be brief on the issue of teaching. I think my colleagues have spoken to it, but I do want to take one word you said and link it to the second issue. You spoke to the fact that, ultimately, one of the purposes of good teaching is to inspire students, and I don't think you can be inspired by somebody who isn't, themselves, totally engaged with what they're doing. I think that intellectual engagement, as you heard my colleagues speak to it, crosses the boundary between research and teaching. They're just all part of the same process.

But that notion of engagement and inspiration I think really speaks also to the research agenda of the universities, and Paul was speaking to this as well. I think professors, whatever the stereotypes, are as engaged with the issues of their time as anybody else. They're people who read a lot and think a lot and worry a lot about the world around them, and they engage with issues they see as significant. You're not going to spend the next five years of your life on something that you regard as utterly a trivial problem. Whatever it is you've committed to, it's going to be something you regard as important, and I think that comes out, in a sense, in the research priorities of the universities.

To go back to the Canada research chairs in our institution, if you look at where we decided to focus our chairs, fundamentally, they were around issues of health, energy, environment, information technology, communication. These are big issues in our world. They're not some idiosyncratic thing off there in the corner that two people in the world are interested in; they're important questions.

Occasionally, I think it's true to say there are national issues that emerge that aren't being fully addressed. It seems to me, in those instances, we've had examples where the federal government has created special kinds of funding to inspire further interest.

• 1020

In the last federal budget there was a sum of money set aside—I can't remember exactly how much; $150 million over five years, if I'm not mistaken—to encourage research in the area of atmosphere and environment around global warming, all those sorts of issues. That seems to me an excellent example of a way of saying: we want more work in this area; we know it's going to cost money; we want to target and flag it and make sure people pick up on the significance of it. And of course there will be more work done as a result of spending more on that.

Interestingly, I would say that program didn't come just because somebody in the bureaucracy in Ottawa or in Parliament decided it's an important issue. Those people who ultimately designated it were obviously lobbied by, in many cases, professors in the universities who said, “We have to do more in this area. You should create a fund to encourage it.” I think that engagement and inspiration really works across the board, 95% of the time, and 99% of that time it works well.

The Chair: I'm going to have to stop that question there. Before I move on to the next person—we have three more people on the list who want to ask questions—I'm going to jump in here because I know you have to leave, Dr. Traves. I don't want to sound as if I'm the devil's advocate here, but if I listened to you guys I would think everything's wonderful in research, and I have to tell you there is another side to the story.

I'm going to give you a hypothetical example here. I don't want to get anybody in trouble, but there are real people behind this. You take a renowned researcher from the University of Toronto—since these universities aren't here, I'm going to pick on them—a Fulbright scholar who gets transferred to the University of Manitoba because his spouse has been transferred to that city and he ends up finding a position. And he is very happy with the position he finds at the University of Manitoba.

He meets up with someone from the University of British Columbia who's also been transferred to the University of Manitoba because her spouse has been transferred to that city. They find there's a niche market there—a market that fits within—and they bring their expertise together and apply for a research grant and spend hours and days and months working with an industry.

Then they come together with a proposal, and they've never been met with such despair before, because all of a sudden they're at the University of Manitoba; they're no longer at the University of Toronto or the University of B.C., and their application isn't taken as seriously. That's the opinion people have, and they find it in the way questions are asked about the expertise on their faculty, the way questions are asked about the expertise in the proposal. They find the peer review process very dissatisfying.

I raise this because I'm familiar with several applications from several different institutions that would fit within that very hypothetical plan. And you said you used to think that maybe because you were a smaller medical facility.... What if the university doesn't have a medical facility, yet may have that expertise on their staff? I know the MRC, or just now the CIHR, has looked down on universities that haven't had medical facilities because they're not seen to have the level of expertise.

So although we say we can find levels of excellence, I don't think we're reaching into what I think are some of the problems. I mean, what I'm hearing here is “Everything is wonderful.” I don't think everything is wonderful—which is why we're here and why we've raised the issue and raised the questions. We're hearing that the peer review process has flaws. We're hearing that the way the CIHR program was distributed had some problems and has created other problems in the system. Now I'm hearing maybe some of that's been worked out, but I'm not satisfied. What if I told you, Dr. Traves, that there's a movement out there to have five universities in Canada get the majority of all the research and you're not one of them? Tell me how you'd feel.

Mr. Tom Traves: Let me take your comments and try to respond in a general way. I hope I come back to all the points you've raised. Certainly they're fair concerns, and we've discussed them among ourselves, and of course in every university we've had conversations along these lines.

First of all, I've been myself a reviewer in my own discipline area for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in the past. I think from that process—I can only speak directly to my own experience—fundamentally there's an openness to the quality of the ideas and the competitiveness of the proposal.

• 1025

It's important to appreciate that there are many more excellent proposals than there are resources available to fund them. So hard choices have to be made. Sometimes people with perfectly acceptable—that's disparaging—very good proposals, simply don't make the cut, because there is just not enough money. You go down the list, and at a certain point you run out of resources, and there you are, and obviously the next project down on that list is a very good project. It's an issue for us, and I think it speaks, in part, to the level of funding that's available in the country and the capacity to fund a variety of projects.

There is a considerable sensitivity to this problem, but it speaks ultimately to the issue of capacity. It's very important to link the capacity argument we've been presenting to you to the issues around research funding in general.

My university just recently made a $50 million proposal—a very large one for us, I think large in anybody's terms—to the Canada Foundation for Innovation for a brain repair centre based on medical work, stuff that's going on in psychology, stuff that's going on in biology. It's a very large project for us, and would be very significant, obviously, given the scale of resources involved in our institution.

We appeared—a group of about half a dozen of us—before a CFI panel. That panel was made up of about a half a dozen people—two from Canada, four from different countries around the world—and these people took us through our paces. What you say is all well and good about what you intend to do, but can you do it? They pressed and they pressed and they pressed about our capacity to deliver on our ambitions.

This was a difficult process for us to go through. At the same time, it was a completely fair process. Since $50 million is a lot of money to spend, you don't want to give it to people who at the end of the day can't deliver on what it is they're making commitments to.

From my point of view, it strikes me that good stewardship requires that kind of careful scrutiny. The lack of resources means that some people at the end of the day may not either measure up, or they may not be high enough up in terms of the priorities or the rankings relative to the funds available. That may well mean that when you aggregate all of these individual decisions being made at all the different granting councils, on all the different kinds of proposals, there will be some concentration of resources in some universities. I think it's inevitable. We have concentrations of population. We have concentrations of industry. We have concentrations of capital. Why wouldn't we have concentrations around this sector as well?

The issue then, it seems to me, is to recognize that strength is going to build on strength. I think that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I think it is a bad thing if you consign the rest of the country to the black hole. I think in the capacity-building presentations we've made, we recognize this issue, and we want to make sure there is capacity in the different kinds of institutions and in the different regions across the country.

The Chair: I guess you're hearing my level of frustration coming from the University of Windsor and their applications, which I've raised several times, and which I'm sure you're all well aware of at this committee.

Having read what came out of the CFI in the applications and comments, they're opposite comments. It's very frustrating for me to follow that process through and to hear your comments, because how we decide and what we decide to do in research is very important. But I don't think we can forget, as we move forward, what has brought Canada to the level it is today. We don't have targeted research, and I'm not sure that maybe we shouldn't, because we seem to be missing a lot of gaps. When I hear how decisions are made or what things we're studying, I think there's a necessity to look at also what affects a large majority of Canadians.

I relate this to the University of Windsor proposal only because it's the one I know best. This was a proposal that dealt not only with automotive but the largest cause of death and injury in children. And we're not funding research for it today. It causes me great concern to see that type of application fall through the cracks, that the process doesn't allow for improvement of applications, or partial funding, that it's a yes or a no process. It's the way the peer review seems to operate.

Dr. Barnard wanted to respond, and then I'll go to the next question.

• 1030

Mr. David Barnard: Thank you. You're speaking about a complex set of issues. When I arrived at the University of Regina, many of my then new colleagues certainly conveyed to me their sense that the University of Regina was not treated on an equivalent footing at peer review processes. They could certainly point to examples where what were perceived to be very strong proposals had been put forward and not funded.

But when we started to look at application rates and success rates, there was no differential between what was happening at the University of Regina and what was happening at larger universities across the country. There had developed an expectation of failure, and consequently a withdrawal from process.

We've encouraged people to be more engaged in the process. In fact, while the success rate has not changed, the overall number of successes has certainly changed proportionally. I can't address the specific example you're talking about, but I know our experience as a relatively small university has been quite positive over the last few years.

I don't want to sound like a Pollyanna on this front, but we have worked very hard and we have had success. With respect to CIHR, for example, we do not have a medical school but we've identified academic thrusts that we think are important for our region. One of them is population health and the determinants of health broadly considered, and not in a faculty of medicine. We've just been very successful in applying for and getting a grant in that area, in partnership with our colleagues at SIFC.

I think all of us here have already said no, in answer to your question about whether we think research should be concentrated in five universities. But I don't think building on excellence will drive us to concentrating in five universities.

The Chair: I'm going to tell you that I've received letters that suggest a large amount of research should be concentrated in five universities. So I hope you'll be vigilant in your position on that.

I don't mean that with any disrespect to the five larger universities, but I'm going to move on to the next questioner because we're running out of time here.

Thank you very much, Dr. Traves. We appreciate you being here and we wish you the very best. We look forward to seeing you again.

Mr. Tom Traves: Thank you very much.

The Chair: Mr. Bagnell.

Mr. Larry Bagnell (Yukon, Lib.): I just have one question about the needs of colleges. My riding is in the north, in the Yukon. I'm not sure how much research has gone to the north, but at the last meeting of the peer review process on the allocation of federal research funds, we heard from the Association of Canadian Community Colleges.

They felt that the capacity for colleges and institutes to be a significant driver of innovation in the Canadian economy was greatly underestimated. They would like to see the colleges included, to a greater extent, in the country's innovation platform and federal research funding framework.

They suggested two solutions to this. First is that a separate initiative be set up to specifically support research in colleges. Second, the present criteria used to evaluate applications by peer review should be modified, for example, to reflect the higher teaching loads and subsequent lower publication rates of college researchers, compared to university counterparts. Then college researchers could be more fairly judged in the review by the present system used by the federal granting agencies.

So what are your opinions on the Association of Canadian Community Colleges' suggestions about setting up initiatives to give greater support to research colleges, or changing the peer review criteria for existing programs so that colleges and institutes are not overshadowed by a university-focused process, which is what they believe?

The Chair: Dr. Giroux.

Mr. Robert Giroux: Thank you, Madam Chair. We, of course, are very much aware that the community colleges have felt for a number of years now that they have not been present at all on the research scene.

When the Canada Foundation for Innovation and its programs were set up—and I was part of the planning—we talked about colleges. That led to the setting up of a special fund that would apply to colleges. I think it was around $10 million at that time, and it's been mostly used. The process, with respect to that fund, involves people who understand the colleges, how they operate, and the kinds of things they're doing.

Now the colleges are participating in the overall competitions of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, but the expert panels, as the foundation calls them, that will be put in place for that purpose will include people who understand colleges, who know colleges, who are in a good position to evaluate colleges, and I think that's the right thing to do.

• 1035

Yes, it's obvious that the granting councils have not been providing funding for the colleges, but there are some exceptions to that. We have in our membership, from a university perspective, five or six university colleges, the University College of Cape Breton, the university colleges in Kamloops, in the Okanagan, in Fraser Valley, and so forth. They're now beginning by combining the university and the college capability to get funding from the granting councils. We're very open to whether what we would call a true community college, which does not have a university degree-granting capability, will be able to get in on this. If the colleges can meet the criteria of the kind of research the granting councils have been authorized to conduct, they should not be stopped from doing so.

What we have to be careful about, though, is that at the colleges, the research is very much in the applied area, in the developmental kinds of areas. There are a lot of linkages with the private sector, with corporations, and so forth, and so we'd have to be careful to really put a value judgment on what the research contributes in terms of new knowledge and moving to areas where it could be commercialized in the future.

Mr. Larry Bagnell: I think that's one of—

The Chair: Mr. Bagnell, I have to stop you for one second.

Mr. Larry Bagnell: Sure.

The Chair: The bells are ringing. We're not sure if it's for a vote or for how long the bells are announced. If it's a 30-minute bell, we'll continue on for about 15 more minutes. We're just waiting to find out. So keep that in mind with questions and answers.

Mr. Larry Bagnell: As a quick follow-up, I think there has been a lot of concern at the committee, which was raised in the last questions, about the application to society in general. So I don't see that as a detriment to what the colleges might be doing. You're saying it's applied research and it's being applied to society, so that seems to answer some of the concerns that may have come up in the discussions.

Mr. Robert Giroux: I don't want to be misread here. I'm just saying it may be that the kind of research they are doing would not fit within the criteria or the guidelines of the granting council, and if there's a decision to proceed to support colleges, these would have to be adapted to meet the needs of the colleges. That's essentially what I was trying to get at.

Mr. Larry Bagnell: That was one of their suggestions, to adapt the criteria. You don't have a problem with that?

Mr. Robert Giroux: Yes, but—

The Chair: I'm going to move on to Mr. Adams, because we're going to run out of time. There is a vote, but we have 25 minutes. So we'll go for another 10 or 12 minutes.

Mr. Peter Adams: Thank you, Madam Chair. As you know, I'm only an associate member of the committee, and so I apologize for arriving late. I'm now between one thing and something else. But I do appreciate the opportunity to ask a question.

I want to comment first on Paddy Torsney's remark about the north. I think part of the point that all the presidents missed is that the federal government has special responsibility in the north. This is over and beyond research and development, and so if—and I believe it's true—research is weak there, then the federal government should, and I think Tom made the point, be doing something specifically about it.

Secondly, not so much in the Yukon, where Larry is from, or the NWT, but particularly in Nunavut, R and D has a potential for the economy that is extremely important in a territory where the economy is very weak. But I looked at the brief and I think it rightly deals not simply with capacity building, but with sustaining capacity, because if we set up a system and we had all the capacity we wanted but had not designed it so that it would be sustainable, I think that would create problems.

Some of us have concerns, and Sue, our chair, raised one of them, that if in fact there's something in the system that has, in the end, negative feedback effects on capacity building, it should be seriously addressed. One of them is the view that there is bias in the way funds are allocated, towards the larger universities to the detriment of the smaller. There are some examples that this has changed, in the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, for example, and the aboriginal thing David mentioned is a good example of that. It does seem to me that we have gone from the Medical Research Council mode to a mode that is incorporating regions and institutions, which were not involved before.

• 1040

We had the discussion of the chairs, and there's some evidence that in the allocation of the chairs more thought was given to the smaller universities. However, one of our colleagues has published a paper that suggests that the support for the smaller universities came not from the large universities but from the middle-sized universities. Nevertheless, I think most of us agree that the chairs are better.

The general thought is that the CFI carries on the biases of the remaining councils. I would put this to you. So that's one; there's a negative feedback bias in the system.

The other is this, Madam Chair, and it has to do with the role of the provinces in what we are discussing, higher education and research. I notice the emphasis on indirect costs of research. By the way, I support that, but I could give an argument for not supporting it, just using the indirect costs of research as an example. Why should the federal government support the indirect costs of research? The federal government should do it because the provinces have systematically underfunded the universities in terms of maintenance, in terms of these things. That's the argument. The argument against the federal government doing it is, if the federal government supports the indirect costs of research, it will simply encourage the provinces to be even less responsive in terms of their support of the institutions.

Madam Chair, my question really concerns, first of all, the biases. Second, how do we operate at the federal level in such a way that we encourage the provinces to invest in higher education and research rather than discourage them from doing so?

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Adams. I'm going to have to remind our panel members that we have about eight minutes left. I'm going to ask you to be brief. I'm going to start with Mr. Davenport, if I could.

Mr. Paul Davenport: This bias issue was raised earlier by our chair. Let me say that I don't see it. I'm an economist, and I can tell you that economists have an opinion about who are the leading economists, who's publishing well, and who are the outstanding young people. If a person moves from university A to university B, it doesn't affect our judgment in evaluating the research grant.

Where the university may matter is when the person is applying in an area that requires massive physical infrastructure, large amounts of equipment. There may be three universities in the country that have it, and the rest don't. If I don't have it at Western and I put in an application in that area, I know I'm going to be at a disadvantage, which is why we need to focus on our strengths and build up that kind of local infrastructure.

What do you do when university researchers are disappointed about their grant applications being rejected? If I have more applications at Western than Windsor, I have more applications rejected at Western than at Windsor. Sometimes they come to me, they show me the evidence, and we think, what were those idiots thinking? Can't they see that we're the national centre? Can't they see what this is going to mean to the country?

What you do is, you pull up your socks and you try the next time. Peer review isn't perfect, but it's by far the best imaginable system. I stress that it's the only one that can make us internationally competitive. Without peer review, we're headed down a different track.

When Mr. Martin and others in government make the link between investing in the innovation agenda and reversing our declining productivity vis-à-vis the United States, they're exactly right. To make that reversal of our relative decline and to be economically competitive, you have to allow for a competitive system in the allocation of the grants. Yes, do the capacity building. Yes, do the special programs we've all been talking about, but my goodness, peer review is the heart of what translates the dollars into excellence. Give up on peer review and you give up on the excellence.

What do you do about indirect costs with the provinces? A couple of years ago Ontario actually instituted a program of paying the indirect costs on provincial grants. We've had our minister state quite publicly that she is committed to the notion that if we get the indirect costs of research from the federal government, there will be no diminution in provincial grants for that reason. We believe her, and we'd hold her to that. I think you have a chance here to make a first-rate investment. I should say

[Translation]

the province of Quebec does the same thing. It finances indirect costs flowing from provincial research grants.

• 1045

[English]

I think you have a chance to make a wonderful investment that would indeed be a net addition to university resources.

The Chair: Just before we move on to Dr. Barnard and Dr. Patterson, we do have one more question. I was trying to get a question in. This committee has already gone on record as being very much for supporting indirect costs, and this committee has not said that we're opposed to peer review in any way. We're asking if it can be improved in any way to address some of these concerns.

With all due respect to everyone here, as chair I have a role to play as devil's advocate from time to time because it's important that we have both sides of the discussion.

Dr. Barnard.

Mr. David Barnard: You're good at your job.

Since the question of indirect costs and the balance between the province and the federal government has been raised, one principle most organizations try to adhere to in budgeting is that you'd like all of the entailments of decisions to be paid or dealt with by the person who makes the decision. One of the things that's happening with indirect costs of research is that decisions get made by federal bodies where there are entailments that are not met anywhere, and the question is, where should those be met? Should they be met by the province or by the federal government?

It seems to me that in the first instance the entailments of that decision should be covered by the agency or by the group that make the decision. Federalism in this country is a difficult enough issue without having to shift things around.

Mr. Peter Adams: My point, Madam Chair, is that the proportion of the transfer to the provinces, the CHST, that goes to higher education is going down. In other words, more of it is going other places, and that's my general point.

Mr. David Barnard: I think that's a more general case, though, than the specific issue of indirect costs of research.

Ms. Bonnie Patterson: I have a comment. I think it is very important that the question of who the peers are gets looked at, and obviously you're doing that in thinking about the process. Why? Because there are cycles, and there is an issue of both capacity and capability. Because there has not been in the country an ability of smaller or medium-sized institutions to build research capability, we get caught in a cycle of not having mid-career or senior academics in smaller and medium-sized institutions who can play a role in the peer process.

Many of the programs that have been put in place are trying to address that, and one of the values of the senior chair, for example, or industrial chair within a smaller institution is that you build confidence and you bring capability into the peer review process that wouldn't otherwise be there.

I would simply point out that there is a cyclical component to this, and the greater the degree to which we can get some of these balances built into the programs, the better we will be as the cycle continues. There are many senior faculty who will be retiring from the professoriate over the next decade, and we will need to build into institutions not only research capability but also capacity.

The Chair: Thank you.

We're going to have to end here because of the vote, but I do want to thank you all for being here.

We know that the universities work very well together through the Networks of Centres of Excellence. We believe there's a lot of collaboration and coordination on what research is being done, and we do appreciate that.

We do want you to keep in mind, though, that as much as there are ebbs and flows in how government does things, there are also ebbs and flows in industry. It's easy to say, go back and do it again, but if after two or three times you go back and industry says that you're not wanted, you're not going to come back to the table again. I don't think anybody is talking about an application that's been turned down once; we're talking about applications that have gone in over and over. The level of expertise that's been on those peer review panels is what we're hearing about from those who have been involved.

I also want to publicly thank Dr. Davenport and the University of Western Ontario for their new initiative with the University of Windsor for the medical facility. That is what we need to do more of in this country. We need to go into partnering, providing the expertise for appropriate levels of service in communities so that a place like Windsor, which may not have a full faculty, can have that type of coordination and cooperation. I think that is what we have to look at in the future.

We do have to go vote, so I apologize.

Thank you very much. The meeting is adjourned.