Thank you.
I absolutely agree with you. This is why we believe that funding fundamental science—and by fundamental science I just need to kind of explain that it is non-targeted. You don't say, here's $2 billion towards COVID or whatever, because we don't know where the next big important crisis is going to be coming up. Canada has always been able to compete on the world stage and also been able to provide help whenever we have needed to, for example, in the SARS situation, as well as in the COVID situation.
We used to be funding science very similarly to the other G7 countries, and now it is going down. The actual research funding is going down. Our ability to compete is going down, and we're in a very dire situation. When you're funding 14% of the project grants that are coming in, you're not funding the majority of the really excellent applications that are coming in.
Thank you.