Mr. Simard, you're absolutely right. In fact, the federal and provincial granting agencies set up emergency funding to ease the stress temporarily.
You brought up research that's carried out in partnership with industry and companies. To that, I would add research that's carried out in partnership with government. Governments are a major research partner.
Earlier, my counterpart from Toronto mentioned face shields. We, too, produced masks for public distribution using 3-D printers. My colleague from Abitibi can give you other examples. We contributed to the response effort, and I should say that we made the masks available for free. It wasn't even a burden. We were happy we could help the community at large, which really needed it.
Giving out money is one thing, but making grants available over the long term is extremely important. A grant has a start and an end date. A fundamental step would be for the government to give researchers subsidy extensions penalty-free, since COVID-19 prevented universities from carrying out research. That would be an option.
Another idea is to put measures in place for students because research is team-driven. The principal investigator isn't the only one working on the research project; there's an entire team of second-year, third-year and post-doctoral students, not to mention research colleagues.
Mr. Martel, my apologies for taking up so much time. Go ahead if you have something to add.