It’s a real question. I come from a U15 Canada member university, a group of 15 Canadian universities conducting intensive research. Last year, we generated $480 million in research funding. We are a big research machine.
The fact remains that research funding in Canada is essentially based on peer review. This grants greater and greater preference to research consortia involving big institutions and smaller institutions. Canada already has a hard time maintaining its international research competitiveness. It’s clear that if Canada wants to use the same money and further spread out its funding, that leads to problems with the quality of the science. What’s coming along behind that is the brain drain problem. The United States is extremely competitive. Europe is competitive. Every single year, we lose researchers who continue their research elsewhere, where there is more money. So, it’s a very tricky situation.
I follow francophone institutions that conduct research, and often, it’s almost survival research. That’s where there could be more collaboration, but the same problem affects small anglophone institutions that don’t have access to their share of research.