HI:Our relatively high standard of living is totally supported buy our natural resource base.This has been generational.
We need to grow our own populations knowledge base but that requires more MIT's in Canada.
Nothing "wrong" with studying ancient civilizations but seeing how to breakdown the human genome to make "custom" medication (addressing protein-coding DNA genes) would help our GDP .
As soon as I had my masters (my under grad was Engineering) I had job offers from the US that eclipsed what I had in Canada and not just from a dollar point of view. 
Canada is a great place to be but for how long.....