It's really a combination of all of those things. We talked about the challenges of the granting councils. They are organized around disciplinary boundaries. Within each granting council, they have review panels which are usually organized around very specific disciplines.
I'll give you an example. I was talking today with someone about some of our quantum researchers who are developing technology that can be used for imaging brain cancers, so they're working with clinical researchers. Do they apply to NSERC, because they're engineers and physicists working on quantum technology—that's what NSERC sponsors—or do they apply to CIHR because they do clinical research? It kind of falls through the cracks.
There are these new programs like CFREF and the new frontiers in research fund, but they're very large-scale programs. If you're just that individual researcher with this great idea, you can't easily get that funded.
To build on this a little further, we talked a lot about funding, but our challenge for our researchers, and what I think you're hinting at, is that we do have a lot of complexities with our funding mechanisms. There are a lot of different kinds of forms—you can call it bureaucracy—that researchers have to fill out.
We have security considerations now that researchers working in certain areas and with certain types of partners have to work on. Universities very much support the security considerations, but the implementation is creating a new set of challenges for our researchers, with new sets of forms and hoops they have to go through that they don't see in other countries.
When we talk about the potential for the brain drain, it's going to be a combination of the funding and these bureaucratic hoops that our researchers have to go through.