Canada is a really attractive location for scientists. Whenever I go to a conference, people are always quite impressed by Canada as a country. We have so much to offer as far as our society goes.
However, when we are sending out applications or when we are actually trying to find people to come to our university, we're finding that people are balking at the investments we are making. They are very interested in coming to Vancouver, for example, to the University of British Columbia. They apply for the actual job advertisement, and then they start digging a little bit further and looking to see how much we are willing to invest—the amount of the average CIHR grant, the ability to get the CIHR grant, the success rate—and that is causing a lot of the brain drain, I would believe.
The other issue is that we are also losing our own Canadian students. The students are looking at us frustrated, writing grant after grant and not getting funded. The students are saying to themselves, “I don't want this lifestyle.”
I have only one student who has gone on to continue in an academic setting. Many of them decide to leave academia. They go into industry, etc., and that is because they are horrified by what they're seeing. We cannot disillusion our own trainees like this.