The easy answer obviously is lack of funding that's been provided to our key national funding programs. Those are mainly the tri-agencies, so CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC for the social sciences. The other issue we're seeing is the increased number of researchers. The number of Ph.D.s we're graduating across Canada has increased, and the number of individuals going into academic positions has increased as well, to the point now where it is becoming quite a crowded marketplace, so to speak. The two simple variables of increased demand and lower supply are causing a lot of these bottlenecks.
The big problem we're going to see, though, with COVID is that because all of the funding resources were directed towards COVID-based solutions and projects, which very much was the right decision to make, the problem is that other areas of research, whether health related or otherwise, are really going to see a gap in funding over the coming years. That's the big worry of the academic community.
Now is the time for increased investment in research in order to not just fund people but to bring us back up to the baseline that we were at several years ago, and to continue to fill the gaps. We're seeing this—