Budget 2018, of course, was a historic investment in science and research in Canada. I think it's really worth noting that there was a major influx of support for investigator-led research, something we hadn't seen before. However appreciative we should all be of that budget, there were bits that were not in it, and that's not surprising. One of the bits that wasn't in it was the sharp expansion in student support that we might have aspired toward had funding been unlimited in some way.
We would like to see a couple of different things in terms of student support change as funding becomes available to the science and research ecosystem. The first of those is simply that the number of awards really does need to increase. To do that, we need to expand the budgets to the tri-councils to facilitate their support for doctoral or master's scholarships as well as the Canada graduate scholarship. We also need to look at the amount of money associated with those scholarships, which, as you correctly point out, has not changed in a long while. I know that many people would like to see that change. I'm one of them. I think that's another area we can look at.
We need to adjust the success rate so that it improves. We need to adjust the funding rate for people who are successful. The innovation piece I think is probably most clearly associated with the mission that Mitacs currently has. There was a very, very large investment in Mitacs last year. If memory serves, somewhere between $700 million and $800 million went towards fellowships. I think we need to watch very carefully and hope that this will lead to important advances in innovation for students.