> Their hiring is paid for through a Canadian government investment of more than > 500 million Canadian dollars (about $364 million) in research fields that are > strategically important, from global warming to artificial intelligence.
Agree it's not clear from the article, but I'd expect that a lot of that is research funding, not necessarily salary. IOW, this is money that might have been spent on this anyhow, getting access to additional scholars is icing on the cake.
I have a friend who is participating in this, and at one point he told me the numbers. My recollection is that maybe he said they were offering $2M CDN per year for 5 years? Or maybe it was $1M CDN for each of the next 5 years, with an option to renew for 5 more?
And I think there was something about a hardware budget, but I don't recall if that was included in the numbers are separate. In any case, while they are offering competitive salaries for Canada, the money offered is definitely not all going for the salary of just the recruited academics.