As Dr. Adem mentioned, there are programs that do rely on contributions from the private sector, such as Mitacs, and I think they work very well.
Also, I would say that Canadian universities have had reasonable success in attracting industry to support projects on a contract basis. In universities, a lot of that funding is used to support students. I'm not sure what the current value is, but back in the day when I was at Western and VP of research, it was already well over a billion dollars, so I'm sure it's much more than that.
I think there are other options that can be applied as well through some of our partnership programming that Dr. Adem mentioned, and that SSHRC also maintains, where those contributions can help to support students—absolutely.
I'll stop there and allow my colleagues to weigh in.