I would be happy to talk about that.
Do we need a department of commercialization? I think we have much better success when we put commercialization into the hands of people who can actually commercialize. That's why I'm supportive of organizations like BioEnterprise, for example. Their mandate is to help organizations commercialize. They also have the ability to work with a lot of people within the sector.
We need to find ways to support those who have the experience in doing commercialization. It may not be another government department, but certainly working within the current infrastructure of Industry Canada and working with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, in particular, because that's what BioEnterprise's mandate is, will be very important.
I get a little worried that by creating another department it just becomes another organization that is doing what is currently being done but is not being done effectively. We know that in Canada we are really poor at commercialization. The U of T business school studies have shown that. I would suggest that we need to fund organizations that actually are on the ground doing the commercialization.
With regard to losing researchers, we're in exactly the same boat in the fruit and vegetable sector for a different reason. Researchers are hitting retirement age. That's a key issue for us because we don't have a plan for what's going to happen in the future. When Adam Dale and Alan McKeown retire from the Simcoe Research Station, who's going to do the berry research and some of the small crop genomics-type research that we need to have done?