There's been a range of these kinds of initiatives going on internationally. In some cases, they've actually collapsed structures down. In other cases, they've created a structure similar to ours. Fonds de recherche du Québec has something similar, as does UK Research and Innovation. They have moved in this way.
There will be a number of changes over time. I would just want to start by saying that. I don't expect programs to shift overnight. I think what we need to do is actually talk to the researchers and talk to the consumers of that research and our international partners to help define how programs need to evolve to meet these needs.
I can give you some examples of things that even from the recent past you could have addressed more effectively with this approach. Take the example of research during the pandemic and how it could have.... It did support, obviously. It was all science- and research-based in terms of the kinds of interventions that were made. But if you're thinking about the kinds of problems we're trying to deal with in developing new vaccines and therapeutics in terms of public health actions, you're trying to bring together expertise primarily from the health science community. If you want to talk about how you can actually get community engagement to protect the public, you need social sciences and humanities. If you want to actually develop the capacities that you need to generate vaccines and therapeutics, you need engineers. You need people who are actually more in the natural sciences to bring that together.
There was no natural vehicle for doing that. In fact, we created a layer of new programs with new governance to be able to bring the councils together and CFI to have an integrated approach to that. That program is called the Canadian biomanufacturing research fund and the associated infrastructure fund. That's under way, but it took quite a while to actually spin it up. It's a very heavy kind of structure for responding to these kinds of issues.
Now, that's an extreme example, but you could see other ways where there are issues that you want to deal with as a country, where there's a societal question or there's a science question—