Many questions, and not simple ones.
I regret to say that my own view is that our ability to forecast accurately is much less than any of us would like. The U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics is probably the best in the world at trying to forecast what kinds of jobs there will be in five years and in ten years. If you go back and look at their forecast from five years ago, they're woefully wrong, despite their best efforts. I think the Canadian occupational projection service stopped making projections some years ago for the same reason. We have to make those efforts, but I think we have to recognize that we have to take those forecasts with a grain of salt and try to make our best guesses, which means having research as good as we can.
I wouldn't say there's not significant investment in research in Canadian universities, nor that there isn't significant funding for Canadian universities, but it's certainly less than we need in order to meet the objectives that all of you as politicians hold for our sector. We have a lot of people retiring, as I mentioned. Our problem is not a shortage of young people coming up to assume those positions, but that the kinds of positions they are being offered do not allow them to pursue a proper academic career, and hence will mean that we'll have fewer researchers and fewer people grappling with these questions in future than we do now. Those are the challenges, and at the heart of them is financial investment. We don't invest sufficiently in post-secondary education and in research.