I think it revolves around thinking about the priorities the country has, the sorts of tools and techniques that will be required to deliver on those questions and the ability to tie together, and work collaboratively on, the infrastructures that we need to develop. As you build a new large-scale accelerator, for instance, it will take many years and hundreds of millions of dollars. The ability to understand the sort of science it will address, making sure that you are bringing in the [Technical difficulty—Editor] through building that strategy, is collaborative and about making sure that you are talking from a bottom-up perspective. What are the researchers in universities and researchers within the country trying to address? There are also some elements of the top-down perspective that we have grand challenges we know we will need to address in the future. What are the tools and techniques we will need to address those grand challenges and make sure that coordination occurs across a time scale commensurate with building these facilities?
As an example, in looking towards climate change and understanding how we can address climate change, we will need to bring in a whole host of different tools, including the ability to understand, for instance, advance materials. If we're looking to develop battery technology, we need to understand how batteries work, how the surfaces and interfaces work. That's the sort of area that a facility like TRIUMF excels at by using particle probes to understand how surfaces and materials operate.
We need to make sure that we're looking as a country at the sorts of questions that we [Technical difficulty—Editor] how we bring all of these things together from both the bottom up and top down.