As indicated before, we're at a time of profound global change in our industry, and I believe we're going to see, over the coming five to 10 years, significant movement towards electric cars, cars that are very connected with each other. That's really important because we have 32,000 people a year die in car crashes across North America because of driver error. If we can reduce that through systems in our cars that have automatic braking, lane-keeping, and awareness of the environment around them, that will be an incredible health improvement for us in that regard.
Then finally, we are seeing huge disruption with companies like Uber, Tesla, and others. These are good things in bringing forward technology, but we have to think as a nation about what that means for us, too. We're thinking about that as companies.
We've thought about it in terms of the technology that we need to develop, the software we need to develop. We looked at Canada. I worked formerly in the ICT sector at BlackBerry. What do we have in Canada? We have a legacy of the world's best mobile communication networks, systems, cybersecurity, and these are really important things for the future of the auto industry. We have that knowledge embedded in our universities. We have more Ph.D.s in artificial intelligence at the University of Toronto, nearby in this city here, than anywhere else in the world. We've looked at all of those things but we had to go university to university to find that capability. There's nothing in Canada that gives you a game plan across those universities because they're all competing with each other.
If we're putting significant investments of public money into our leading research facilities and into our universities, we might want to think more carefully about how we can identify those veins of technology that could be enabling for technologies, as we've heard from other panellists, or in the auto sector, so that we can liberate that and find ways to work it better with our Canadian companies. They can take that, skill it up, and become the next BlackBerry that will grow into 170 countries instead of just serving our Canadian market here. So that's what we're looking at. We think we can help because we're already in those countries and we can use our international supply chain to help deal with it.