I can't tell you what the conclusions are yet because we're not finished. It would pre-empt what council will be discussing, so it's not appropriate.
The nature of the debate divides along several lines. One line is what's the right proportion of allocation of our funds to our various programs? In broad strokes, our various programs are what we call the “open grants” competition. These are grants that researchers make to us in any area of health research.
The second bulk area is the strategic initiatives our institutes have developed and are developing with partners.
The third area is our commercialization programs and knowledge translation programs more broadly.
You'll appreciate that there are not necessarily clean lines between each of those programs. They overlap quite considerably.
The other consideration, independent of which program, is risk management for 2008-09 and future years. A major job of my colleague Jim Roberge is to advise council on this, because as we make commitments....
Research commitments are typically multi-year. When we commit, we typically commit for three to five years--on average, about four and a half years. If we fund a grant that you would apply to us for, you would get a grant for five years. And yet we get funded only one year at a time. We're constantly having to mitigate risk.