Let me start with the second part.
If you look at most OECD countries, the space allocated in our GDP for traditional manufacturing is gradually shrinking as people go to other countries, less costly countries, to manufacture products. So we have to go up the knowledge and manufacturing food chain. We have to focus on areas where we have tremendous value added. In order to have that, we need the people. We need people who have university degrees, who have college degrees, who can contribute to the knowledge economy. Therefore we have constantly made investments in people at the research level and also in the form of scholarships at the graduate and post-graduate levels. We need to have people who will be there for the OpenTexts of the world, for the RIMs the of world, and for all of those other companies that operate in the Kitchener-Waterloo hub.
The department gets involved, I would say, through developing, refining, and implementing the science and technology strategy, which I think is a tremendous foundational document. We also, at the other end, work with the Science,Technology and Innovation Council that the government established, which every two years produces a “state of the nation” report that permits Canada to benchmark itself—not just the federal government, not just provincial governments, but all of Canada—to compare how we are doing. Are we improving? Are we slipping? Because the competition in most sectors is becoming much more challenging. So what we have to do is continue to bear down on that. We have our fundamental document and our strategy. We have a two-year report card made by a third party, the council. And within that we try to continue investing. So we invest in people, and we invest in innovation. Our strategic aerospace and defence initiative, which is a program we used to work in partnership with the aerospace sectors, is a fine example of partnership where x number of initiatives are put forward and there is joint risk-taking by the company and the government always with a view towards innovating, because out there, there are people competing with Canada and they are getting better, faster, and smarter.
Thank you.