As I said in my presentation, there were major investments, and some of my colleagues here before the committee spoke about their results. There were the projects I mentioned and several others in development. There was recently an announcement about a new cell and gene therapy manufacturing facility in Hamilton. There is also the SmokePond Biologics project here in Laval, about which we are very enthusiastic.
So things are moving in Canada. There have been significant federal government investments, and that's good. This comes later in the vaccine production chain, but I think that the early stages, meaning the innovation and basic research generation process that is being carried out in Canadian research institutes and universities, ought not to be ignored. This research depends almost entirely on federal government research funding, whether through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the CIHR, or the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, NSERC. There is still a lot of work to be done because the budgets of funding research agencies like CIHR and NSERC have not grown very much in recent years, particularly given the growing numbers of researchers in Canada and the constantly-rising costs of research.
Just as the cost of living is increasing, the costs of infrastructure and staff are also rising. So if the CIHR has a budget of $1 billion a year, and it doesn't increase very much from one year to the next, the end result is a much lower success rate year-over-year in CIHR and NSERC competitions. As a result, potential innovations from Canadian universities are not adequately funded.
What I'd like to see in terms of government funding is a 10% per year increase over 10 years in the budgets of the three federal councils, to bring Canada's position closer to the leaders in the field, like the G7 countries, the United States and Europe. There's still a lot of work to do.