Thank you.

I would like to thank the Standing Committee on Science and Research for inviting me. It's an honour to come after our colleague and friend at the Canadian Association of University Teachers, so I would like to say hello to her.

The Fédération québécoise des professeures et professeurs d'université, or FQPPU, is the voice of 19 university teacher unions and associations across Quebec, representing nearly 95% Quebec's university professors. In addition to defending the interests of its members, the FQPPU advocates for universities as an accessible public service dedicated to the production and dissemination of critical knowledge. Those principles will inform my remarks today.

University teachers have a keen interest in bringing graduate students into the world of creation and research. First, those students are the teachers of tomorrow, who will take on the responsibility of supporting universities and other institutions in their pursuit of invention and the promotion and dissemination of knowledge. Second, those students will become the vehicles for the transmission of knowledge in their professional lives, regardless of the setting.

The federal government has an important role to play, specifically through the scholarship programs administered by the granting councils as well as programming for research grants and chairs. However, a number of statistics and recent statements are a clear sign that federal support is out of sync with today's challenges and opportunities. Accordingly, we agree with the positions expressed by CAUT, the Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System, which released the Bouchard report, as well as the Support Our Science group, just to name a few.

We want as many graduate students as possible to be able to focus fully on their research and to overcome the socio-economic barriers they face in accessing knowledge and joining the scientific community. That is why we are calling on the government to significantly increase scholarship awards for master's and Ph.D. students and to index the funding regularly. We have told you this time and time again: scholarships and fellowships have been stagnant for two decades, so much so that it is now impossible for a single person depending on that money to live above the poverty line. What does that mean in an economy marked by a shortage of workers and inflationary pressures? Structurally, it pushes people towards what is known as survival work and may force them to give up their graduate studies. It also puts those who come from modest means at a further disadvantage.

Furthermore, the government needs to give the granting councils the capacity to provide significantly more scholarships in all fields. Canada will need more people with the skills to replenish and disseminate knowledge in order to face the cultural, environmental, economic and social challenges that lie ahead.

Lastly, the government must increase its overall research grant budget for the granting councils. As CAUT just highlighted, much of the financial support students receive is in the form of grants. As one of our members pointed out, research grants and assistantship contracts come out of professors' funding, but the amounts are not enough.

In closing, I'd like to mention a couple more things, if there's time. It's necessary to promote greater access to the research community, distinguish more clearly between support for the next generation of talent and recognition of the rarest achievement in excellence, build the largest possible pool of researchers and leverage prestige. To do that, the granting councils should provide similar-sized grants to master's and Ph.D. students, no matter the field of research, and use awards to recognize exceptional applicants and research achievements.

We submitted a brief to the committee in December, and it ties in with this study. Supporting the next generation of researchers also means implementing a range of measures to promote the dissemination of French-language research.

The last point I want to make is this: it's important to come up with some way to work with the provinces so that the funding leads to more teachers and a more supportive framework. The number of teachers has not grown at the same pace as the number of graduate students, and the gap is significant.

Thank you. I would be happy to answer your questions.