The shape of our recommendations across the board for an increase in research funding has really been directed towards the support costs of research, which is another way of talking about indirect costs.
You were at the groundbreaking for our new centre for innovation, technology and entrepreneurship. It's wonderful to build these beautiful new buildings and put people in them, but then we have to run them, and they are expensive to run. We've had a challenge with the funding councils at the federal level, recognizing that we, too, have indirect costs to support our research.
One of the important things about applied research at the college level is that every one of those projects includes students. In fact, a lot of the time it's actually embedded at the program level, so there are academic outcomes to the applied research projects that we're doing. It really is important. And we employ teachers; we don't employ researchers. It's very important for us to maintain that balance in the faculty, where they're still teaching and are also leading applied research projects with students. Many of them are actually still working in the industries they're teaching for, which is important to do. All of that, of course, requires resources, and those are very limited.
That's partly why. To be honest with you, $40 million is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the federal research spend, but we're also trying to be reasonable in these times of restraint and allocation challenges. There are a lot of great things to support around the table, and it would be a small contribution to offset some of those costs we are eating right now.