Well, in testifying to the Bouchard committee on the future of scientific funding in Canada, one of the topics that I was asked to speak about was in fact the major research facilities. They shared with me the plans that have been put forward by the government, which I think go a long way towards addressing how Canada deals with what are really national labs, even though they're essentially university labs in a number of cases. I certainly would like to see more government involvement and overview of these laboratories.
I think one thing that was completely omitted in any of the documentation I've seen so far is the role of the provinces in such situations, and there certainly have been situations in the past in which a smaller province has sited a major national facility and has been asked to come up with substantial amounts of funding. I think the existence of this major research facilities committee and overview on such national labs should lead to a dialogue with the provinces. In some cases, it may be inappropriate for the degree of matching that's been asked for in the past to be included. I think it's a topic that needs to be on the agenda, along with the establishment of such committees.
If I may, the types of projects I was talking about are international projects for experiments, as opposed to facilities, as opposed to something that is expected to house maybe multiple experiments, but they're large-scale on the Canadian scale, certainly. It would be appropriate to consider seriously whether this structure that's being set up for the overview of facilities should be expanded to consider international programs of this scale that are being situated here in Canada—the experiments I'm talking about.