It's a really important question. I think Atlantic Canada has a lot of really good things going, so I'm not going to start with a doom and gloom picture of where we are. Survival is a very strong incentive, and I think we've realized, from the business community side of things, we have to step up and not depend on our government leaders to have all the answers. I think the business community across the region has shown a lot of leadership in identifying areas of opportunity for the region based on our natural resource base and our human resource base that allow us now to be establishing businesses that are competing nationally and internationally in markets that we have not been in traditionally.
Our traditional industries are a great platform, but we're now building on them, innovating in those areas, and diversifying into other areas across the region like the ICT sector, the bioscience sector, aerospace, advanced food manufacturing, and so on.
I'm going to start with a positive because I think we are positive about the future of Atlantic Canada, and we're seeing some very good results. Besides that, what can be done? I mentioned one particular area. I think we're getting better at supporting the development of early-stage companies in some of these new areas, like IT, bioscience, and so on, through the use of some tools that have been supported by the federal government, the incubators and accelerators that can help early-stage companies be successful. We operate one of them ourselves, but there are several in the region. Those are really key to helping companies get from an idea stage or that pre-commercial stage through to commercial success.
We're running out of the appropriate infrastructure, and this is not just a Prince Edward Island issue. While the federal government has put significant investment into infrastructure in the last few years, we would like to see that focus on infrastructure shift to what we would consider strategic infrastructure. Not that water and sewers and roads aren't important, but we need strategic infrastructure directly connected to economic development opportunities where there's a clear return on investment to the federal government, to the taxpayers of Canada, from those investments in some key sectors.