I think it depends on the case the researcher makes in their area of study. There are some where you could draw a fairly direct line to economic benefits—for example, if you're an engineer, if you're patenting things that you're bringing to market or if you're talking about translational research. If you're talking about biomedical research, you can argue that by easing the disease burden in Canada, we'll be improving the economy as well. There are fields that are like that.
There are others, where there are incremental gains that aren't immediately obvious. To go back to the example of Dr. Karikó, that paper was published in 2005 and it was used in 2020. It's very hard, in any one short-term research project, to demonstrate economic advantage. If we gut that, the opportunity isn't there. I don't know what would have happened or how much longer it would have taken to get a vaccine against COVID if we hadn't had that paper from 2005.