Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for the opportunity to offer my views and experiences on these topics.

I'm a member of NSERC's executive council, advising the last three presidents on policy directions and implementation, and I'm chair of its committee on discovery research. Basically, I am part of the bridge between Canada's research community and NSERC, but I am a professor first.

Research-granting programs are superb at supporting excellence. Canada does not lack for talent worthy of that support, even while we must also recognize the need for continuous and rapid evolution to maintain our international reputation as a nation of discovery.

Let me quickly get into some details about an exemplar program that I know well, that of discovery grants or DGs. They drive Canada's scientific research productivity. Sixty-two per cent of all Canadian publications in natural sciences and engineering involved researchers who received a discovery grant. More importantly, the portfolio effect of such programs creates two additional and critical outcomes. DGs maximize the economic efficiency of discovery in terms of discoveries per dollar expended, and they expand Canada's ability to compete internationally in science. At a Canada-wide scale, programs like the discovery grants lay the foundations for both specialized advances and transformative change. We need both kinds of discovery.

Transformation is built on the shoulders of generations of specialized and even incremental work. The ways we evaluate grant applications, whether they are in SSHRC, CIHR, NSERC or other granting councils or agencies, continue to evolve rapidly, partly because of the enhanced research coordination through the Canada research coordinating committee, CRCC. There is an emerging role for the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, or DORA, a modern approach to research evaluation that assesses thoughtfully what researchers have achieved, rather than looking at journal impact factors or other reductive, and potentially lazy, metrics. The community has embraced this approach, and agencies in Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere have also.

What are some of the key awarding criteria, and how do they relate to excellence? Every grant program I know of includes fierce academic skepticism. Has the applicant accomplished impressive things that made a difference in their field or more broadly in society? Are there flaws in the proposal? Can applicants do the work they are suggesting? Importantly, are they training the next generation effectively?

I'll dwell on the training aspects of research grants. More than 60% of core research grants go directly to launching the careers of the next generation of Canadian talent. A great training program imparts skills that enable those people to find relevant positions in any sectors that use those skills, or to create their own positions through innovation. When researchers help create wonderful training experiences, it “echoes in eternity”, to borrow a phrase from Marcus Aurelius. That student's career launch becomes memorable in the best way and might affect the people they help train in the future.

Let's be clear: Training students is really difficult. They are as diverse as Canada itself. Their abilities to hit the ground running in their programs of work are all over the place, and their lived experiences can define how they fit into some kinds of research groups. Evaluations of grant proposals now require applicants to consider best practices for how to deal with that diversity. The training program, in other words, is about achieving excellence, not cloning the supervisor.

Canada faces outward in a competitive global environment. We engage with and learn from agencies and researchers everywhere. Our granting agencies have evolved in response, and Canada can boast of a superb portfolio of researchers at all levels and in all fields. The ways in which we evaluate grants here are a reflection both of the evolutionary changes the agencies have recognized and embraced, and of philosophical and political decisions about the best ways to ensure that research generates answers that matter for Canadians.

Thank you.

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