Grant-funded employees

The goal is to finalize the revised policy and begin implementation before the end of 2027.

The exact plan has yet to be determined. It will be more comprehensive than the existing extended health and dental plans available to GFEs and will reflect the fact that GFEs play an important role in research at UVic.

Benefits costs will be borne by the grants, as is now the practice at almost every Canadian research university. We plan to have some funding available to assist account holders who face significant additional costs (e.g. those individuals who supervise many benefits-eligible GFEs) during a brief transition period, but the amount to be made available is not yet known. We will provide further information regarding transition funding when available.

Effective immediately, all new grant applications with GFEs in their budgets should include the cost of benefits. While the exact cost of the extended health and dental plan is yet to be determined, we recommend budgeting 20% for the cost of benefits and Mandatory Employment Related Costs (MERCs), which follows our recommendation for postdocs.

We are encouraged by the unexpected smoothness of the postdoc transition in 2024, in which supervisors faced an analogous set of unexpected costs.

The proposed policy revisions limit a single term to a maximum of three years or the duration of the Research Funds, whichever is shorter. This is an increase from the current policy, which has a maximum term duration of one year. Appointments can be renewed for additional terms following the same conditions, as per current practice.

We expect there will be relatively small impact for most graduate students. Part of this project, outside of the policy revisions, was to clarify and provide additional language around research assistantships for graduate students, and how they are appropriately divided between employment income and stipend income. Graduate students are paid through Academic Research Assistantships (ARAs) when their research directly contributes to their own thesis, dissertation, or other academic degree requirement. Graduate students are paid through Employment-based Research Assistantships (ERAs) when they are paid to conduct research work for an account holder that is not in support of their own degree as listed above. ERAs fall under the updated policy, but ARAs do not. For additional details on the two types of Research Assistantships, see the Faculty of Graduate Studies website.

This consultation period is focussed on updating the policy itself. Changes to the hiring process will follow the implementation of the policy and will be informed by our work in improving the hiring process for post-doctoral fellows. The hiring process will also reflect the likely change to a new campus-side employee management system. We will engage in further consultation regarding hiring process once the policy is finalized.