Thank you, Chair.
Thank you for coming today.
I'm just looking at some graphs here. There's one here about spending, with a peak of around $500 million spending on research around 2006, but then it drops drastically and starts coming back up. There's quite a gap there of research funding from governments. Then there's another graph here that shows the private sector is really filling the gap and stepping up to the plate. They've gone up about $70 million to $80 million more in the last couple of years. It seems like the private sector is filling in the gap. But it also seems to correlate that it's important that the federal government put their share in, in order to trigger the other partners.
Is that very key to a lot of the private sector investment? They seem to be doing the big increase, and not governments. But is it very important that the federal part is there in order for the private sector to step up to the plate?