The Perimeter Institute had a number of mandates. One was to attract the brightest minds in the world. It was doing that. One was to train the next generation of the brightest minds. It is doing and was doing that. One was, of course, based on an independent audit of the institute itself, which was very favourable and showed not only that they operated and managed their money well, but that they were attracting and building their capacity at a greater rate than was anticipated....
The same type of study was done again by KPMG in June, I think—just a few months ago. The government always has to look for areas where basic research can build the future economy. Physics has been well known the world over to be one of those areas. Whether it ends up as a new generation of computer, or in information communications technologies, or as better imaging facilities for our medical personnel, or in surgical simulators and in better transmitting different things, this will always be an economic area that almost every country on the planet wants to go into.
Whether we should go into it is actually—if I can use the phrase—a no-brainer. Supporting the Perimeter Institute would be based on the criteria and their ability to have achieved their historical mandate, which was in fact set forward quite well by the previous government. They met all of those criteria, and that's exactly why they would have received the $50 million.
You mentioned the Canada research chairs earlier, which has, I should point out, for the most part, an entirely different program from the Perimeter Institute's. It does in fact—of course I wasn't prepared to talk about that, but I will—have a two-part process. The first selection is actually based on the institution. The universities have an opportunity right now to put forward that, first of all, they are the best people to do this particular type of research, and they state all the reasons for that. An independent peer review panel of expert scientific folks will decide which universities might get a chair position. Once that selection is done, the actual universities that win a spot then have to prove that the researcher they want for that particular research is in fact the best researcher on the planet to do that research.
If the researchers' peers believe that to be the case—it's not the government and it is completely independent—then in fact there is a Canada excellence research chairs grant available. It's $10 million for the researcher and his or her team over seven years.