Industry committee  Thank you.

Industry committee  Thank you, Chair. Thank you, witnesses, for being here. Clearly, the aerospace and space industries are a huge part of Canadian industry. They employ hundreds of thousands of people, and they have a significant role to play in the aerospace and space sector across the globe. Obviously we had the Emerson report that came up with a number of recommendations to be implemented.

Industry committee  It goes to the relevance of the question on the data. Clearly, what he's talking about in terms of jobs versus what they're saying about innovation, there is no correlation between the number of patents and the number of jobs. So let's get close to the point.

Industry committee  Thank you very much. Do I have any time left?

Industry committee  Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Minister. It's always an honour to have you here at this committee, and I appreciate your sparing the time to come over here. I just wanted to explore a little bit more about Digital 150. Clearly the world is changing and the digital dimension for all of us in Canada is also changing.

Industry committee  That's kind of where I was heading with that. You normally print it on demand, but now you're printing it here in Canada to make that product that you want, like some of these drones, etc.

Industry committee  But there are disruptive technologies, such as inkjet printing of organic components, which some people are doing here. I'm just trying to get the break point, where the jobs will start flowing back here because the technology is here. You won't need that cheap labour cost elsewhere, because it's being done by machines more.

Industry committee  I was hoping you could, but it's certainly interesting from that perspective. Obviously, you're also making big decisions about which folks you're going to actually support in terms of development at Ryerson in the DMZ. What criteria do you use to actually determine which pieces should be done?

Industry committee  Thank you, Chair. Thank you, everybody, for being here. I'll ask various questions. I'm going to start with Mr. McKay. I'm really just trying to better understand looking forward in terms of disruptive technologies. What criteria do you use? Why have you invested in automated cars versus thorium for developing power?

Industry committee  Hopefully you get a big return out of it when some of these technologies develop, so that's also a fairly motivating factor, I would have thought.

Industry committee  Mr. Lavoie, I have a question for you. You gave us the example of 3-D printing, which is fantastic. It's a local technology, etc. But my question to you is from a manufacturing point of view. Is that technology actually going to change the way manufacturing is done? In other words, is it going to take that low-cost labour element out of it so that some of these jobs now will actually be good jobs here in Canada that we can actually develop and expand?

Industry committee  Will it create jobs?

Industry committee  Very briefly, because I have one more question.

Industry committee  Okay. I'm going to cut you off because I have one more question. One of my questions is whether we are missing the boat a little here, because the common denominator seems to be money. All of these disruptive technologies will change and change the value of money to everybody, etc., but there are technologies that exist now that can be applied that could save us billions of dollars.

Industry committee  Thank you, Chair. Thank you, witnesses, for being here. It's obviously been quite an interesting discussion. My thoughts are that everything we've talked about so far are things that have already occurred. Looking forward into the future, what criteria do you think you should be looking at in terms of what the next generation of disruptive technologies would be, and how are they going to impact the research funding that we're putting into all these universities?