Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to go to you, as well, Mr. Neuheimer.
I represent a riding that, after the softwood lumber sellout was signed, lost 2,000 direct and indirect jobs. We lost Canfor, Interfor and Western Forest Products. They all went down within six months of the softwood lumber sellout, and the sector has never recovered. In my area of British Columbia, Fraser Mills, where my father worked, used to be a very vibrant wood production facility, but it's now a parking lot for raw log exports. Where hundreds of people worked before, now there's just a handful of people working. When I see my high school buddies who worked in the wood sector and are no longer working there because of bad government policy, I understand your call for putting into place smart government policy, so that rather than killing those jobs, we're actually building a vibrant forest products sector.
I'd like to come to your points around market access and research and development. You're indicating a request for $22.5 million a year for market access. That sounds to me to be the minimum, really. We see that other international trading partners invest many times more in export promotion support than Canada does. We do a lamentably bad job on that. I would like you to comment on the market access funding. How much was received last year to support our wood products export? This year you're asking for $22.5 million.
Second, as to research and development, Canada is last in the industrialized world when it comes to the production of patents and the production of doctorates. We have done a very poor job in terms of research and development. How important is it to put in place innovation funding so that Canada can actually compete with the kind of research and development that we're currently not doing?