Thank you so much, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses.
As we're continuing this conversation on our food processing study, it's remarkable the parallels we have with an earlier study that we did in the 42nd Parliament on technology and innovation in this sector. I thought that was a fascinating study. I was lucky to be a member of the committee during that time.
One of the witnesses we had during that study in the previous Parliament was one of my constituents. He started up a company called EIO Diagnostics that is tackling the problem of early mastitis detection in the dairy industry, which costs the industry millions of dollars per year worldwide.
During the course of his testimony, he said as a start-up that the four pillars that foster young companies are capital, talent, advisory services and markets. He said that as a nation we're pretty good at the talent part in Canada, but a lot of companies—I think, Professor Charlebois, you alluded to this—really have difficulty accessing capital in that start-up phase, when a young, intrepid entrepreneur has that really big idea, but securing the capital to get the company from the drawing board up to an actual company....
Professor Charlebois, I'll start with you. Could you comment on his testimony and, if you want to, provide a little more detail on how the federal government could structure those grants to allow these intrepid entrepreneurs who get that big idea to actually start up something physically here in Canada?