My apologies for not being able to speak French effectively.
We do have some very real strengths. It's interesting. As a cultural producer, as a content producer, Canada is actually extremely good. We produce way above our weight. We have wonderful filmmakers and novelists and musicians and what have you. We do very, very well. We don't see that as an economic sector as much as we should. If you look at something like Cirque du Soleil, a really brilliant organization, they produce hundreds of millions of dollars of benefits to Canada every year, yet for some reason they don't get seen as an economic power in the same way that Research In Motion does. We should start seeing it that way. The advantages of bilingualism and multiculturalism are very real; we have the opportunity to reach out way beyond our borders in a way that many other countries do not.
You asked about fast enough. First off, the question is, what is fast enough? Fast enough is a very good idea coming from a corporation getting funded within a month. Not fast enough is that same idea taking 18 months to go through regulatory procedures, or going through vetting processes. I feel sorry for governments right now. The accountability expectations on you are crippling, quite frankly, and everybody is very nervous, so decisions take way too long.
Singapore is a very small country, a very nimble country, but the person who makes the digital content decisions down there basically works with a staff of about two or three people and makes decisions within a week. Try running the same kind of thing through our regulatory procedures and our decision-making; it's a nightmare. Guess what happens. People go looking overseas to find the money to do the things they want to do, and sometimes they move with it. We lose too many people outside the country that way.
So faster basically is putting more faith in the hands of the civil servants who manage these processes, and having a sort of different kind of oversight in which you don't have long and incredibly complicated application procedures. Our university is very, very successful at filling in grant applications. You have one of the most innovative universities in the country, one of the best in the world, basically choked by the process of applying for grants. Is that what you want your key researchers doing, applying for grants, or actually doing the work? For the creative personnel, it's the same thing: do you want to turn our nation into a nation of grant writers? That doesn't actually propel the economy very far, success in filling out forms. So I would challenge... It is not about the federal government, provincial government, municipal government. The mindset in Canada is not fast enough. We need to really turn that around and turn it around aggressively.
I will speak more aggressively even about the Asian connection. Canada is amazingly disconnected from Asia. We do not know what's going on. I don't mean individuals here; I'm sure many of you have travelled over there. The scale is astonishing. Outside of Hanoi they are in the process of producing a science and technology city that will have 1.2 million people living in it. They have a little sign on the map saying they're going to put in a university, so I asked how big the university would be. They said 13. Well, 13,000, that's not so big. No, no, no, 13 universities will go on that one site. The scale in Asia is simply mind-boggling.
Take a look at Sangam's Digital Media City in Korea, outside of Seoul. It will have a digital media concentration of 25,000 researchers based in one location. Take a look at Z-Park in Beijing: it has over 400,000 employees. How do we compete? You compete by getting in the middle of it and understanding what's going on and what's happening on the cultural side. How do we do it? Take at look at what we're studying. We don't study Asia enough in universities. We don't study Asia enough in elementary and secondary schools. We need to know where our competitors are, and we need to know that right now. I'm very concerned about this, largely because of the lost opportunity. I would simply draw your attention to Australia. Australia made a decision about three prime ministers ago that they would become an Asian nation. Canada can do so. We have, through British Columbia, an outlet on the Pacific. We have a multicultural population, millions of Canadians who have access to Asia. We don't use them.