I should also mention our colleagues at SERENE-RISC. Their driving force, the head of SERENE-RISC, is on our governing board as well. That's another venue with a number of workshops that try to bring together these various stakeholders.
Organizations like SERENE-RISC and ours are the few that actually step up to do more than just focus on.... The thing with cybersecurity is that we're all over-employed. We're super busy. For everything we choose to do, there's something else that's really important we're choosing not to do. We're not bored. It's not that we don't have anything to do and so we think maybe we can address this quantum threat. We're way too busy with too many things. There needs to be some encouragement. The thankless work that Benoit and the SERENE-RISC network do, for example.... They hardly get any money and they still do amazing work. I think these people need to be encouraged, thanked and supported.
Part of it is funding. We say “funding”, but when you're a professor and you ask for funding, people assume you want more undirected research money. Canada's already great at that. I'm talking about very focused, mission-oriented support to achieve these very important objectives for Canada, and working backwards from there.
There is a small, committed group of people across Canada who would help with that. They need to be proactively encouraged to do this. Right now, what they're told is that they have to keep advocating, but they don't have time and resources to do this. We, as a country, need to recognize the value they bring to us, the citizens, and tell them to keep up the great work and help them do more.
I also think there are not enough of us. Another thing we need, as part of developing the brain trust, is the intellectual capital and the workforce needed for Canada to even survive in the cyber world a decade from now. We're way behind. Two to five years ago, looking ahead a decade, I said that there's no way we're going to have a fighting chance if we don't have 20 new positions targeted in cybersecurity, with at least five of those in the social and human sciences, because that's a really important part of this equation.
Of course, now the number I see is 50. Our friends in Germany were talking about 50 faculty positions in applied cybersecurity at Saarbrücken, and I don't know how many more at the new Max Planck Institute. We're talking about over 200 serious faculty positions in this targeted area, because it's really important to their economy and security. In Canada, there are zero—not even a CERC, or a Canada 150, nothing. I think there's a huge catch-up there to build up our brain trust in these targeted areas.