I'd like to address a couple of things. On the commercialization front, there are two things I want to say. With regard to my own personal area of research, what we really need is to be really, really good at some things that we're not quite good enough at if we want to attract companies and additional commercialization. I couldn't emphasize that too much. You can just look at the high-tech industries, where Waterloo is really good at certain things, and you see the commercialization that comes from that. I don't want to get into that in more detail at this point, but I'd be happy to if someone has the question.
The second thing is, I've been involved with some small companies, and in comparison with our neighbours to the south, we're not very good at supporting small business with regard to research. I couldn't emphasize enough how important the SBIR--small business innovation research--grants are in the U.S., as opposed to the way we do things here, which always involves matching grants and a lot of bureaucracy. There, people write grants, they get the funding, they start. Here, you need to get some matching money and you have a bureaucrat following you every month asking you where you've spent the money. I think that's a big difference.
With regard to maintaining our researchers here, we clearly have some problems right now. The university funding is not growing. That means we're not hiring new faculty members. We haven't hired for a few years. We won't hire for another three or four years. That's not unique to us. On top of that, the sorts of opportunities we could create, if we did get really good at some things and attracted commercial ventures here, would have an enormous impact, I think.
That's all I really want to say, I guess.