Yes, certainly. It actually started with Mike Lazaridis and the folks from Research in Motion, who put forward some funding in I believe 1999. The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council saw this as a brilliant idea and a few years later offered $25 million.
We did some auditing of the Perimeter Institute to make sure they were meeting their goals, deadlines, and mandate, and we were quite satisfied with that independent report. We put forward $50 million in 2007, over five years, that was matched by the Province of Ontario. That funding was coming to a close in fiscal year 2011, at which time we again put forward $50 million over five years.
Again the institute has been looked at by independent auditors, the latest being KPMG, I believe, who had nothing but good things to say—I'd be happy to read it to you—about the management and about their ability to meet their mandate in terms of teaching, and in terms of attracting to the institute the top researchers from around the world, not only to come here to teach the next generation, but also to do their research here in Canada, which gives us an opportunity not just to invent something but to build it here. That provides better-quality jobs for Canadians and it improves our economy. We can sell those products, those processes, and those advancements in current technology to the rest of the world.
We have an institute here that's the best on the planet. It's attracting the best on the planet. It has been supported by independents as having an excellent record in terms of its management and overall operations. We support it for those reasons, as we need to as a government supporting basic science.