Largely because there is a lot of interaction amongst the genome centres in western Canada—Genome Prairie, Genome Alberta, and Genome B.C. We see a lot of the linkages that each of us wants to build with industry and so on to deal with moving stuff from the lab to commercialization as requiring the convening facility that programs like western economic diversification allow. They provide some funding that allows for the interaction costs, bringing people together and so on for working out programs and projects. They're not the major funders of the research projects themselves; they're the facilitators that bring the various parties—the industrial people, the universities, the not-for-profits—together to develop joint programs. That's been very helpful. It's not a huge amount of money compared to the actual projects that are done, but support for those projects rarely includes support for that kind of facilitation or interaction.
On October 20th, 2009. See this statement in context.