Thank you for the question.
It's always been a serious problem. We've very rarely had any federal government funding. That's why we work together to create networks of universities, territorial governments, provincial governments and federal departments when we can. It's to create good research programs.
Every year, it's a scramble to stack enough programs together so that we don't lose too much money, which would jeopardize the foundation. We're a non-profit charity. We lose funds in the delivery of our work. That's fine. We're not here to make a profit.
The biggest issue is not so much “how long?” as it is “what's happening right now?” The federal government has made a lot of big funding announcements for science funding going out in the Arctic, which is excellent.
We were very hopeful, as a result of that, that our ships were going to be fully booked this season, but when we went to the community members on the ground—because the fund flows through the communities, as it should a lot of the time—they wanted, for instance, to do hydrography in the marine protected area near Paulatuk and Tuktoyaktuk. Despite there being enough money in what was announced to do that kind of work, the money that was flowing isn't available yet and might not be available for several years.
It's expensive to run ships in the north. To do marine science, you need ships. Most of the science that needs to be done is in nearshore regions. We're the only organization that can provide those ships, yet we're constantly struggling to build the programs together through whatever different pockets are available in order to do it. It's a constant problem that we're hoping is going to get better, but it requires serious, increased long-term investment and, as Adrian said, a whole-of-ecosystem approach.
Very briefly, part of the other issue is that we're successful because we work under the cogeneration of knowledge framework. The communities lead and we follow, and we take a whole-of-ecosystem approach in our work. That's really hard to fund when you're going to ISED, DFO, Agriculture Canada or whomever else, looking for funding. Everything is very specific in terms of what the research is going to be and what's going to come out of it. That doesn't work well in a northern framework, when we need to learn more about the ecosystems more broadly.
Even though our model works, it's very hard to get it funded under the current federal funding regime.