In the lacunas we observed in the current ecosystem, there was a fragmentation. There was a difficulty of eligibility for Canadian scientists to build collaboration with international partners and work with them. There was a worry that interdisciplinary research was difficult to support in the current set-up. It's not a lack of goodwill on the part of the actors, but the funding instruments are not designed to support interdisciplinary research.
One of the big things missing, which is becoming more and more important, is mission-oriented research. CIHR does that to some extent in the health sector, but if we had a large mission on, let's say, food security or on limiting foreign interference or other types of larger societal needs or capacities, those would be difficult to launch in the current set-up.
Those were the main gaps in the current funding. Overall, we were hoping that they would coordinate the efforts of the existing actors to make sure these problems are not just technological. As my witness colleague pointed out, social science and humanities are very important in addressing these issues. Sometimes it's a sociologist or an economist working with an engineer and with public health to identify how to establish food security. It's relatively difficult to do that right now, and the capstone organization was designed to do this.
I must say that with the increase in our defence commitments and with industrial strategies that will be adopted to support this, it becomes supremely important to have such instruments, if only to put the money from industry and universities together for a shared project.
There were other aspects to this, but that was the general set-up. It was that we needed some sort of quarterback to make sure that the whole team would move forward on the field.