Collaboration Is Infrastructure: Building Canada’s Scientific Bridges Across Region, Sector, and Language

Canada’s collaboration problem is not a shortage of talent — it is a shortage of bridges.

Canada does not have a collaboration problem because its scientists distrust one another. It has one because collaboration, in this country, is largely left to chance. Talent is distributed from St. John’s to Victoria, across large and small universities, in French and in English, and across academia, industry, government, and the non-profit sector. Yet the connections that turn this distributed talent into shared discovery remain thin, uneven, and too often improvised. If we want pan-Canadian science, we must build for it deliberately, with resources that match the ambition.

Three fault lines run through Canadian research: region, discipline and sector, and language. The first two are widely recognized. Research capacity remains concentrated in a small number of large institutions and metropolitan centres, leaving smaller, northern, and rural institutions to work harder for equivalent visibility. Disciplines and sectors continue to operate in silos — attending the same conferences, publishing in the same journals, and applying to the same funding streams — so that the chemist rarely meets the sociologist, and the hospital rarely engages with the start-up.

The third fault line — language — is the most profound and the most revealing. The data are clear. According to Acfas, only 5 to 10 percent of funding applications in the natural and health sciences are written in French. In the social sciences and humanities, that share has declined from about 25 percent in 1990 to under 15 percent today. At the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, French-language applications have a success rate of roughly 30 percent, compared to 37 percent for English-language submissions. The fragility is also structural: the financial crisis at Laurentian University and the pressures on the University of Alberta’s Campus Saint-Jean have exposed the precarity of francophone research outside Quebec. When a francophone researcher must work in English to be funded, cited, and heard, that is not a free choice — it is a systemic constraint imposed on an entire scholarly community, and a loss to Canada as a whole.

Naming the problem in this way matters, because it determines the kind of solution we pursue. These gaps are not closed by goodwill alone. They are infrastructure deficits — and infrastructure must be designed, funded, and maintained.

The good news is that Canada already has the foundations in place. The New Frontiers in Research Fund was created precisely to increase collaboration among disciplines that do not normally work together, and its Transformation and Exploration streams support interdisciplinary and intersectoral teams. Federal agencies are currently modernizing their research funding architecture. And under the Action Plan for Official Languages, the federal government has begun supporting Acfas’s Service d’aide à la recherche en français. The building blocks already exist. What is missing is a coherent strategy to connect them so that bridging becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Three structural decisions would transform occasional collaboration into a true national infrastructure.

First, language equity must be treated as collaboration infrastructure, not accommodation. This requires removing the funding-language penalty so that proposals are evaluated solely on scientific merit, regardless of the language of submission. It requires investing in high-quality translation and knowledge mobilization so that French-language research circulates nationally and English-language research reaches the Francophonie. And it requires adopting the recommendations of francophone researchers themselves — including those published by Acfas — rather than designing policy for them from the centre. Advances in artificial intelligence offer significant opportunities to reduce language barriers, but only if they are governed in a way that strengthens French-language scholarship rather than quietly flattening it into an implicit English-default monoculture.

Second, the bridges themselves must be funded directly. Mission-driven and challenge-based research programs that require teams spanning at least two disciplines, two sectors, and — critically — more than one region and language are among the most reliable ways to generate collaboration that would not otherwise occur. The deliberate inclusion of francophone minority institutions, smaller universities, and rural and northern institutions must be embedded in eligibility and evaluation criteria, not treated as aspirational language in program preambles. A bridge that connects only the largest centres is not a national bridge.

Third, we must build the connective tissue between projects. This includes shared, bilingual-by-design digital research infrastructure, as well as human intermediaries whose role is scientific brokerage: matching problems in one region, discipline, or sector with expertise located elsewhere in the country. Research networks do not self-assemble at a national scale. They must be intentionally convened, curated, and sustained. This coordination work is a form of specialized expertise and should be funded as such.

None of this is exceptional. It is how national infrastructure is built in every other domain: the desired connections are identified, systems are designed to enable them, and ongoing investment ensures they are maintained. We do not expect a national electrical grid or railway system to emerge spontaneously from regional goodwill. Scientific collaboration is no different. Left to chance, it follows the path of least resistance — toward the largest institutions, the dominant language, and pre-existing disciplinary networks.

Canada’s scientific strength has always exceeded the sum of its regions and its two official languages. But that “greater than the sum” effect is not automatic; it is engineered. If we want francophone and anglophone communities, large and small institutions, and distant disciplines to shape the future of Canadian research together, we must first build the bridges that connect them — and then invest in sustaining them over time.

Ultimately, collaboration should no longer be seen as an aspirational outcome of science policy. It should be recognized for what it is: a national infrastructure essential to Canada’s capacity to generate, share, and transform knowledge for the benefit of society as a whole.

References / Références

• Acfas (2021)
• Government of Canada / Canadian Heritage (2025)
• University Affairs (2022)
• NFRF / Tri-agency (2026)

AI Acknowledgment

“Acknowledgment of AI use: The author used an AI assistant (Anthropic’s Claude)…”

The authors used ChatGPT (OpenAI) to assist with language editing, structural composition, and  French translation during the preparation of this editorial. The research, analysis, arguments, and  original intellectual contributions presented in the article are those of the authors. All content  was reviewed, verified, revised, and approved by the authors.