If the investments had not been made, what would the situation look like now? Well, one can never be sure about predicting the future, but I think we can look at what the situation was in the 1980s and early 1990s. Hardly a day that went by when a newspaper didn't feature an article about the so-called brain drain. We were losing highly skilled personnel--university faculty, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows--to other jurisdictions, particularly the United States. I don't think it is rocket science to state that we would have been depleted at the very time that so many university and college faculty members are reaching retirement age. The advent of the investments in CFI and the research councils has essentially stopped the brain drain and in fact reversed it.
We know, for example, based on grants made by CFI--and those are only a portion of them--that in the last five years there was recruitment of 7,200 new faculty members to Canadian universities and colleges, of whom 40% came from outside Canada, because as we just heard, Canada will not be able to depend on simply its own population to produce. Many of them are, of course, returning expatriate Canadians, but they weren't rushing to return prior to the advent of these investments.
I could go on, but I think that is probably the greatest threat, that we would have simply depleted ourselves of highly qualified personnel.