Well, of course, I would argue that it's very important. The dynamic that I see among universities and colleges across the country is....
We really have focused since the mid-nineties on helping our industries become more competitive.
The context for me is that Canada has this SME economy and is therefore not particularly able to invest in research and development on the business side. The firms are too small. They don't have the scale. Moreover, we don't have enough head offices. Typically, head offices are the ones that lead our research and development efforts.
Around the mid-nineties, we recognized that in fact we have world-class research going on at our universities and colleges. One of the ways we can really address the productivity and innovation gap that our industries have is by building these industry-facing programs between universities, colleges and the industries, to enable us to work with them on research and development that matters to the industry. This is why I feel these cluster ideas that my university is investing in are extremely important.
We can make Canada more innovative, and therefore more productive, by staying the course on this. It's important to recognize that this has been happening with governments of different colours since 1995 or thereabouts. We are getting increasingly good at these activities at our universities and colleges across the country, but it's not on a political time frame; it's on a longer time frame.
We are doing a whole bunch of the right things now. We have the right programs in place. What I am suggesting is that further investment in them would really help. I think we're doing the right things now. It's a problem of scale; we need to scale up.