There's no question that we need strong universities across the country. However, there's also no doubt that we need pillars in order to advance research. In my view, we need both.
The problem is quite simply the size of investments. Ideally, we would have enough money to develop the research sector across Canada.
In fact, one of the strengths of Canada is that we have really strong universities across the country. However, at the level of financing we currently have, there's no doubt that access to it is going to be limited.
It seems to me that the key is what our leading universities do, as in the case of Dalhousie's leadership on our oceans: They involve other universities in the region. Ideally what we would be moving toward is clusters across the country. This is increasingly the case, so we can have good connections and good collaborations between smaller, mid-sized and larger universities, all of which are optimizing their own strengths to make an even greater collective effort.
My sense is that inevitably we need leading universities at the same time as we need diversity. Certainly 15 members is not enough for a country like Canada. We need, in fact, 15 hubs or regions to which all of our universities are actively contributing. That is going to take a much larger investment.