I'm his only Manitoba colleague here, and NDP.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairperson.
I'm going to start by thanking you all. Those were great briefs, and too little time to do it all.
I'm going to start with William Maes. Concerning your focus on research and e-learning and the emphasis you've put on developing a knowledge-based economy, we've just been dealing with a number of cutbacks that seem to detract from movement in this direction, significant cuts in literacy, huge cuts in research that provides for alternative policy work. How do you jibe the two? Don't we have to go back to square one and at least make sure that Canadians have access to basic literacy and numeracy in order to access the knowledge-based economy?