Mr. Chandra, you're absolutely right. We need both. We need discovery research. It's a continuum right through to application research, but science is messy. It's not a neat continuum. You may have incremental research and there may be breakthroughs, but we need both ends funded.
To that effect, under the previous government, in 10 years we fell from third to eighth on higher education R and D. On business R and D, we fell from 18th to 26th. I don't like that trajectory. We need to reverse that trajectory.
You've talked about commercialization. Commercialization and application absolutely matter.
I'd like to give you two examples. In the CFREF money, we've talked about that $900 million, and we've seen other research on the brain. We have an aging population today. If we look at Alzheimer's disease, which has this terrible human toll, we can see that there's also an economic impact. Today, someone is diagnosed once every five minutes, and the cost to the system is $15 billion. In 30 years, we're looking at someone being diagnosed once every two minutes, at a cost of $153 billion. We need those applications. We need to understand the science, but we want to find treatments.
The second example I'll give you is that of quantum computing. Canada has wonderful strengths in quantum computing. I don't think it's a secret to this committee that we are in a race to build that first quantum computer.