Thank you.
Many of the problems we face in Canada are interdisciplinary. They go further than the natural sciences and engineering, medicine, or social sciences and humanities alone, and they require an interdisciplinary or maybe a transdisciplinary approach, moving outside universities into the private sector, public sector and communities. That's very hard when we have separate agencies with separate funding streams that they wish to support.
We have a few things, such as the Canada first research excellence fund, which is interdisciplinary, but probably not enough. More of that would be very helpful.
The other thing is the long-term support that is necessary to build these research programs and to keep our capacity in Canada. Remember, when these research networks stop for a year, we lose all our post-docs, graduate students and others. Where do they go? It's probably not in Canada. That's when we leak them overseas. We need to keep that steady momentum together for these groups to keep people here in Canada, so undergraduates know what their trajectory might be in this country because of that longer term prospect.