In my opinion, public funding of research is absolutely critical to what we call Canada, both in the development of products but also in assessment of safety, etc.
There are two key things on that. I believe you go from the discovery research to capturing it. And when you capture that research, you'd better have your customers at the table, and you'd better have been working with industry right from the start.
I think historically in our public sector and universities, we did research and made it into perfection, but we were never talking to our customers or people who were going to use it. We have to understand that not only does it work and we can do it, but the competition, the price, and how we put in supply chains.
There's a lot more than just the discovery to ensure that we as Canadians build it here, make it here, and sell it to world. I think that's very important.
So public sector research is critical.