OTTAWA-
In a lab at the University of Ottawa, Sarah Laframboise hopes to advance cancer research by studying a gene that causes the disease in humans. His research focuses on a “model organism”: tiny fungi that have a surprising amount in common with us.
“Yeast and humans share about 20-30% of the same genes,” she said. “The goal is really to find underlying mechanisms that cause different disease states.”
The 27-year-old has always dreamed of being a scientist. After a decade in college, she nearly completed her doctorate and amassed around $100,000 in student debt.
“I’ve often worked multiple jobs at once just to make ends meet,” she said. “When I started my master’s, I had to take out additional loans because then you weren’t allowed to work outside the lab.”
Funding for research students in Canada comes primarily from grants and scholarships from the three federal granting agencies: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
But the rewards haven’t increased in years. Laframboise was earning $21,000 annually until last year, when she was awarded a $35,000 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council scholarship.
She is not alone — funding has become a central issue for the on-campus group she leads, called the Ottawa Science Policy Network.
The group says many scholarships amount to less than minimum wage.
They also say that graduate students haven’t seen a raise since 2003 and that postdoctoral researchers have only seen their salaries increase by 12.5% in those 19 years.
That’s the reason for an online petition calling on the federal government for increases. It has more than 1,000 signatures and will be presented to Parliament in the fall.
At a rally on Parliament Hill on Thursday, dozens of scholars carried an open letter signed by thousands of their colleagues, printed on sheets of paper joined together to form a 60-meter-long train, to be symbolically handed to the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Science and Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne.
They are calling for scholarship amounts to be increased by 48% to match inflation since 2003 and indexed to inflation to keep pace. They also want the government to create 50% more graduate scholarships and postdoctoral fellowships.
Jeanette Whitton, associate professor of botany at the University of British Columbia and president-elect of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, said she received financial support as an early-stage scientist. career, but in today’s financial reality, “I don’t think I could have made it.”
“I am concerned because never before have graduate students and postdoctoral researchers been so financially strained that their future careers are in jeopardy. And that means the future of science in Canada is in jeopardy.
Champagne was not made available for an interview. In an emailed statement, a spokeswoman for his office said the value of postdoctoral fellowships had been increased to $45,000 per year.
Asked to respond to the group’s requests for increases, Laurie Bouchard said the government “will continue to work with (the research community) to explore ways in which we can continue to support our next generation of researchers.”
“We’re going to lose highly skilled individuals to other places that will pay them,” Laframboise said. “I don’t aspire to stay in academia, but if I did, it wouldn’t be in Canada.”
A report by the House of Commons Science and Research Committee released in June recommends creating more scholarships, giving researchers a 25% raise and indexing scholarship amounts to the index consumer prices.
He also called on the government to review and increase funding for the three granting councils and find ways to improve the continuity of their funding for researchers.
The committee said it heard from Universities Canada that doubling the number of scholarships available and increasing their value by a quarter would cost about $770 million over five years.
“A lot of people my age are thinking about starting a family, getting married, buying a house,” Laframboise said.
“My younger brother, he’s apprenticed in the trades. He’s 20 and has way more savings than I can even imagine. So I think that sets a really good example of the disparity.”
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on August 11, 2022.