Yes, and believe me, I'm sure those who have received that money are taking it very happily. Three billion dollars is a lot of money. What we're seeing with the Growing Forward 2 program is a lot of consortium-based research initiatives that involve a number of different institutes and a number of different scientists.
These are still short-term projects of four to five years in length. They can apply back again for funding after this time period, but the type of long-term funding commitment I was thinking about or referring to was A-based long-term funding that a single scientist can work on, or a single group of scientists can work on, a single aspect of research for a long period of time.
This type of funding used to exist within the AAFC system and in some respect in other organizations as well, but this type of research support has dwindled in favour of short-term projects, for high impact, quick results, etc.
There is time to think about revisiting the former model and maybe arriving at some sort of a hybrid model to help us think not only about the short-term needs, but about the long-term strategic needs as well.