Thank you for your appreciation that there are many different research priorities. It really is difficult to pick what is the top or even the many important priorities.
What we understand of the capstone, in fact beyond what the current granting councils do on a disciplinary front, is to bring about that mission-driven research that addresses greater complexity than might be addressed in an otherwise discipline-focused research project.
These missions to be defined—and this is where we emphasize that it's important that we not just think of scientific, technological, moon shot missions, but that we look at the complexity of problems that we're facing—are often not to be addressed exclusively or even primarily by scientific or technological solutions.
I like to give the example of the pandemic and how within the first year, there was a vaccine. Those biomedical scientists did their job remarkably fast and effectively. The pandemic persisted. There was more to it than a scientific, technological solution. The whole complexity of deployment within our health care systems, across different populations and across the different provinces—there was much more to the pandemic across the world than that vaccine.
The example would also come from climate science. Our climate scientists have told us the challenges. What needs to happen now is many more changes, from behavioural perspectives—individuals, communities, municipalities—and the different scales. That is where social sciences can come in—