There's more than one positive result. One was clearly that the five different commodity groups all came together as commodity groups, looked at their own provincial priorities, assessed what those research priorities were, and then looked at developing national priorities. That's where it really was a consensus-building exercise that resulted in some very positive work being done by each commodity group. From that, of course, some tremendous project proposals came forward to take advantage of what I believe was some pretty generous federal funding, with industry coming up with a 25% share. In some cases, it's difficult for industry to come up even with that, but we feel it was a very good funding percentage, because it was going to stimulate some much needed research work in those priority areas.
Perhaps one of the truly negative parts was this. We understood from other hort clusters that AAFC research centres were involved. When it came to the edible horticulture cluster, we found out at the 11th hour of the 11th day that no AAFC research centres or their employees would be permitted in any of these CHC projects, which was news to us. That's where some of the frustration comes in. It is when things aren't spelled out from the outset.
It has created a lot of headaches for industry but also for our national association, the Canadian Horticultural Council, which has gone to great lengths to make this thing work for their commodity representatives. I think they've done a tremendous job, not to say that AAFC staff haven't been accommodating in trying to work through these things too.
I think the initiative was so new--it was a new direction--that perhaps not all of the bugs were worked out as they should have been.
Going forward, I'd say that if the federal government wants to sort of repeat this initiative with the lessons that have been learned, I see a great opportunity. We're also, through this national research science cluster initiative, involving more universities and involving provincial research people, so the collaborations are happening on a much wider basis.