I agree with the statement before that industry doesn't spend money willy-nilly and they do due diligence before they spend. So if we lower the bars to public matching of industry funds, provided it's for the public good and in a pretty competitive way, if we created a pool of funds where every professor had a hunting licence to go out to a company and say, “You give me $10 million for the University of Alberta, and the government will match it, and it has to be shared among everybody”, if entrepreneurial professors had that opportunity to go out to the business world and say, “Come to Canada, spend your money here, the Canadian government will match it with very little peer review in nine months, and we'll wait”, I think we can be nimble and get a hell of a lot of private sector funding. We have excellent organizations that know how to administer this, but the fewer rules to matching with industry, the more industry-relevant research we've done, the more inward investment we'll get, in my opinion, in all sectors, not just health.
On March 5th, 2013. See this statement in context.