In your question I think you put your finger on the answer. You alluded to the multiple players in this: the communities, the businesses, the various jurisdictions, and so on. In this new recognition of complexity, what we see is unlike the situation in the 19th century and 20th century--namely, that no one level of government in any position can alone fix problems or make a big difference. It's got to be done in collaboration and in some kind of connection with all other key aspects. The challenge now for any of us, in any of our organizations, is to act in ways that enhance and enable and fit with the actions of others.
For example, on our research council we now see ourselves as intimately linked to the universities across Canada, the private sector partners of those universities, and so on. We are truly in a multi-stakeholder world, and we're very conscious that whatever we do has to be done in a way that makes sense in terms of those other pieces of the puzzle. That's a new role. At some level it seemed to me that historically, in the case of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, we had the little idea in the beginning that we could develop programs and support them more or less within ourselves. Now we find increasingly that our programs and how we think about them must be done in the context of other institutions, communities, and so on. That's the challenge.
It seems to me that the federal role is now in a much more diverse and complex context, and it's in that context that the opportunity for me to be here and for these kinds of exchanges to take place are really important.