On 16 April 2024, Kaitlin Kharas was one of a select few people ushered into an office across the street from the Canadian Parliament and given a sneak peek at the latest budget.
It was, perhaps, an unusual source of excitement for a PhD student. But Kharas had waited a long time to see the contents of those stuffy, bureaucratic pages: the biggest pay rise in 20 years for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers across Canada. The budget included huge boosts to both the number and value of government scholarships. “There was absolute excitement and giddiness when I saw those numbers,” she says.
It was the culmination of a years-long campaign; Kharas had been leading the project for the past six months.
The Support Our Science (SOS) campaign began in 2022. From the start, organizers knew it needed to be led by graduate students speaking in their own voice, says Marc Johnson, a biologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga who helped to launch the campaign.
SOS’s first executive director was Sarah Laframboise, a PhD student at the University of Ottawa. When she stepped down in November 2023, Johnson and the board chose Kharas, who was doing a PhD in paediatric brain cancer at the University of Toronto, as her replacement. “Kaitlin had distinguished herself as professional, well spoken and up to date on the issues,” says Johnson. “She and Sarah have been our face and voice, and the people who put our vision into action.”
The campaign involved rallies, meetings with cabinet ministers and e-mail campaigns. In the months leading up to the budget, the campaign held a press conference and encouraged supporters to write to the prime minister and finance minister. But Kharas says one of the most effective events was the nationwide walkout in May 2023. After the government failed to increase scholarship amounts in the 2023 budget, some 10,000 researchers at 46 institutions across the country stopped working in protest.
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