I want to thank you very much for all of your presentations. I have a number of questions. I will try to get through them all.
Mr. Davidson, I've heard about indirect costs since being here in 2001, on the industry committee at the time. They have been a challenge.
Part of the reason they have been a challenge is that this is probably the least sexy part of research funding. You have the granting councils; you have the Canada research chairs, which fund people; you have CFI, which funds facilities; we had during the stimulus time the knowledge infrastructure program, which funds facilities.
It's very exciting to open a facility and very exciting to fund a researcher and talk about the work a researcher is doing. Indirect costs are the stuff that has to be funded, but even the phrase “indirect costs” is sometimes somewhat perplexing to people.
Can you speak to why it is so essential that we fund indirect costs at a level commensurate with funding people and facilities?