Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Certainly, we've heard through the course of this study that more funding is needed for science and research here in Canada. I'm sure everyone is very happy to see that our proposed budget includes those measures.
However, our task on this committee is to look at the distribution of those funds. We've heard some suggestions that probably do have an impact on smaller colleges and universities, in particular, the administrative burden of the applications themselves. As we were told, lead investigators are increasingly spending less time doing their research and more time doing the administrative work related to cumbersome funding application processes. It's obviously much heavier on smaller institutions.
Do you have any particularly concrete suggestions for how this administrative burden—in other words, excessive red tape—could be reduced?