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House Hansard - 197

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 15, 2023 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 197 - May/15/23
Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)
  • May/15/23 7:04:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, this adjournment debate arises from a question I asked the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry on May 1. On that day, as I was asking the question, on the lawn of Parliament Hill, there was a crowd of young researchers from Ottawa universities demanding to be heard by the government. They were part of a cross-country demonstration that day that involved nearly 10,000 graduate students, post-docs, faculty and supporters. They had walked out of 46 institutions across Canada. Their question for the government was simply this: Why are grad students are getting paid the same amount today as they were being paid 20 years ago? Their wages, which come in the form of federal scholarships and fellowships, cover the full-time work they perform doing their research, and that work is the backbone of our university research in Canada. These are scholarships, so these are not average students, but our best and brightest, yet the federal government pays them below minimum wage. They are forced to live below the poverty line. Master scholarships have been pegged at $17,500 per year for 20 years. Ph.D. students get a bit more at $21,000. Therefore, my question for the minister is this: Why have these scholarship amounts not changed since 2003? Last week, at the Standing Committee on Science and Research, we were studying the same question. One of the witnesses was Sarah Laframboise, a Ph.D. student from the University of Ottawa, who had organized the May 1 walkout. She had appeared before our committee exactly one year ago on the same subject. This time, and I am quoting from the blues, she stated, “It is frustrating, however, that in the last year since my appearance there has been no action by our government to solve these problems. During this time, we have 7,000 scientists and 40 scientific associations sign an open letter. We had 3,500 signatures on a petition...delivered to the House of Commons. We rallied on Parliament Hill in August. We spoke to MPs, ministers, media and the public about our cause, and sent over 2,000 emails to our MPs. But this wasn't enough. Budget 2023 contained no new funding for graduate students and post-docs.” Also testifying was Dr. Maydianne Andrade, a professor of biology at the University of Toronto. She said, and I am again quoting from the blues, “Our current system is a massive filter. It is a filter that is filtering out people as a function of their finances, not as a function of their excellence, not as a function of the likelihood that they might be the next Canadian Nobel prize [winner]. “We are filtering out people who can't take the mental load of living in poverty, those who don't have credit ratings that allow them to take out loans, those who are unable to manage incredibly challenging research agendas while holding down several jobs. “We are filtering out mature students who have dependents, and we're filtering out anyone whose family can't help support them through this without massive debt.” The science and research committee recommended last year that these scholarship amounts be increased. We have the advisory panel report on the federal research support system, headed by Dr. Frédéric Bouchard, and commissioned by the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry himself, recommending that these scholarship and fellowship amounts be increased and indexed to inflation. I spoke with Dr. Bouchard recently, and he was mystified as to why these recommendations had not been followed. Therefore, I will repeat my question: When will this be fixed? When will we start paying our young researchers a living wage so they will stay in Canada, where we need them to be, instead of leaving for any number of countries that would happily pay them twice as much as they receive here?
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