UBC Vancouver campus walkway with cherry blossoms and modern academic buildings in the background.

Canada The 2026-2027 competition has closed (institutional preselection closed 23 October 2025; candidate submission to the FRQ closed 2 December 2025). FRQ normally publishes the next year's rules and deadlines in late summer — check frq.gouv.qc.ca for the 2027-2028 call before assuming dates

Merit Scholarship Programme for Foreign Students (PBEEE)

The PBEEE (Programme de bourses d'excellence pour étudiants étrangers) is the Québec government's flagship award for foreign researchers, run by the Fonds de recherche du Québec. It is the single biggest funding route into a Québec doctorate for a Sri Lankan researcher, and it works very differently from a normal scholarship. There is no open application. You must first be preselected by the Québec university or College Centre for the Transfer of Technologies (CCTT) that wants you — the institution nominates a limited number of candidates, then those candidates submit to the FRQ. In practice that means your real competition happens at department level in Québec, months before the FRQ deadline, and it starts with a supervisor who wants to take you on. The money is serious. The doctoral component pays CAD 25,000 a year for the first nine sessions and CAD 12,000 for the last three, to a maximum of CAD 87,000 (roughly LKR 20.4 million) across twelve instalments. The postdoctoral component pays CAD 35,000 for one year (about LKR 8.2 million). A short-term research or professional development component pays CAD 3,000 a month for up to four months, capped at CAD 12,000. One firm exclusion applies: you must not be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, and you must not have applied for Canadian permanent residence. Sri Lankan citizens applying from Sri Lanka fit the target profile precisely. Note that most Québec doctorates are taught and supervised in French in the humanities and social sciences, though engineering, computing and the natural sciences at institutions such as McGill, Concordia, Polytechnique Montréal and INRS routinely run in English — check the language of instruction before you commit.

Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ)

Government-funded

emoji_events Award Overview

savings

Doctoral Value

CAD 25,000/yr, max CAD 87,000 (~LKR 20.4M)

science

Components

Doctoral, Postdoctoral, Short-Term Research

handshake

Access

Nomination by a Québec institution only

fact_check Eligibility Criteria

block

You Cannot Apply Directly to the FRQ

Candidates must be preselected by a Québec university or by the CCTT network before they are allowed to submit to the FRQ. Approach the department and a prospective supervisor first — the institutional preselection deadline falls roughly six weeks before the FRQ deadline, so a Sri Lankan applicant should be in contact with a Québec supervisor by mid-year.

public

Not a Canadian Citizen or Permanent Resident

You must not be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident of Canada, and you must not have applied for permanent residence under Canadian immigration law. A Sri Lankan citizen holding only a study permit is exactly who this programme is designed for.

school

Doctoral, Postdoctoral or Short-Term Research Only

There is no undergraduate or taught-master's component. The doctoral scholarship funds up to twelve sessions; the postdoctoral component funds one year; the short-term component funds a research or professional-development stay of up to four months at CAD 3,000 a month.

warning

One Award Per Person

Candidates must not have already held a Merit Scholarship for Foreign Students from Québec's ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur. The award also carries an open-access condition — your thesis and resulting peer-reviewed publications must be made openly accessible without embargo.

account_tree Application Process

Find a Québec supervisor and a host institution first

Email prospective supervisors at Québec universities with your CV, your research interests and a short project outline. Nothing else in this process can start until a Québec institution is willing to put your name forward.

Be preselected by the institution

The university or CCTT runs its own internal selection and submits a limited list of preselected candidates to the FRQ by the October deadline. Ask the graduate studies office directly what its internal cut-off and documentation requirements are — they are institution-specific and earlier than the FRQ's.

Submit your FRQ application by the December deadline

Preselected candidates submit through the FRQ's own portal — a two-page project proposal, CV, publications, and the host supervisor's endorsement. The 2026-2027 round closed at 16:00 EST on 2 December 2025.

Accept, then apply for your Canadian study permit and CAQ

Québec adds a step other provinces do not: you need a Certificat d'acceptation du Québec (CAQ) from the province before you apply to IRCC for the federal study permit. Sri Lankan applicants submit biometrics at the VFS Global centre in Colombo. Budget several months for CAQ plus study permit together.

Why Québec?

Québec hosts some of Canada's strongest research universities — McGill, Université de Montréal, Université Laval, Concordia, Polytechnique Montréal, INRS and the Université du Québec network — and the province funds research through its own three-sector Fonds de recherche rather than relying only on federal money. Montréal in particular has a very large international student population and living costs well below Toronto or Vancouver. The trade-off is language: French is the working language of the province and of many programmes, and Québec's own immigration rules for post-study work weight French ability heavily.