Well, there's nobody better to decide on research than the end user. For so many years, a lot of research was done without consultation with industry as to the result they hoped to have or could make use of. We changed that around about two or three years ago when we started science clusters, working with industry, with academia, with the provinces and ourselves, and with the private sector as well, in making sure that for any amount of money there were not overlaps and gaps and that we were focused on a result. We've been having great success with that. We've been able to make a lot more use of our scarce dollars.
Having said that, I know that there has been a lot of talk of going back to 1994 levels of spending on research. I'm happy to tell you that when we do the comparison, even taking inflation into play and so on, we're actually spending about 15% more now than we were in 1994, even with inflated dollars and so on. So there's a little bit of miscommunication as to what all that research funding does. We've committed even more to that. As you rightly point out on the numbers you talked about in the main estimates, there are a lot of points where the innovative idea has been put to bed, and then how do you commercialize it? How do you put that into practice so that farmers, processors, and so on can actually make use of it? That's what we're trying to target: it's that next step.
Researchers are fantastic in Canada. They do tremendous research. They get it done. They crack the egg and then they put it on the shelf. Now, how do you make use of that? It takes an extra step in between for the commercialization of that innovative new process to make sure that it actually hits the field, or the farm, or the processing sector and is made use of. That's what we're targeting.
We've had some great ideas come forward already this year. There are some applications that we're just in the process of reviewing, so I won't get into them because we're still working on them. But there are some tremendous ideas that will actually return dollar value back to the farm gate.