Thank you, Mr. Chair, and my thanks to our witnesses for appearing today.
Madame Bak, our government has made a commitment that the economy will grow not at the expense of the environment but hand in hand with it. A strong environment will lead to a strong economy and vice versa. Recently, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development had an op-ed in theToronto Star saying that innovation should be a Canadian value, that innovation should be at the core of every aspect of economic decision-making .
In a Toronto Star article that you wrote, you made an interesting point. You said there was a “need...to connect the dots, because if we just do more innovation, we will get the same results as we did in the past, which is lots of promising companies, but none that grow up here.” I thought that was a really interesting comment, saying that the whole purpose of innovation is to grow companies, to change the way that we're doing things. You're saying that we also have to recognize that we may be innovating a ton but we are not getting empirical results in the long term. If you could comment on that, it would be great.