This is an important question that you raised. I believe that a lot of things changed during the pandemic, when you compare it with the pre-budget information you just talked about.
Based on a publication that Nature published recently, the early career researchers, basically post-docs, were the main people harmed as a result of this pandemic. When we look at that, many of the post-docs needed to be productive during their temporary position, because nowadays that is one of the qualifications when they want to apply for jobs, especially academic jobs. They need to have publications. They need to have the experience of the mentorship and mentoring their students. Post-docs are the right spots for it. However, during the pandemic, even for a short period of time, a year or two years, the post-docs saw that the time was going by so fast and they were more worried about it.
In terms of the numbers, I think that was one of the things we tried to advocate for. We touched on that with the tri-agencies, to make sure that there would be an extension for those post-docs who have literally earned this time and could not take advantage of it to be productive.
Of course, depending on the different fields, there will be different outcomes. Some felt they were more comfortable with working from home, so they kept their productivity, but some of them were not. So that's one of the things. One of them was about the budgets....
The other thing is about the inflation. When we want to adjust the salaries for inflation, the post-doc's wage has not changed that much. It's very negligible. For tri-council or other agencies, or private agencies, there is no wage increment for post-docs over the year, not even for 2% or 3%—nothing. It's like $45,000 for first year and $45,000 the second year. That's another thing that has not changed, and it's even worse now that the inflation is higher.
I would say that these are a part.... The pandemic is in part to blame for this. The general problem is with that, and not necessarily relevant to the pandemic.