I have a couple of points to make here. It's very important to separate things and to clarify. Sometimes I wonder if we got it clear enough in the documents we wrote. I say that because there's this old 1970s, 1980s outmoded thinking around industrial policy and stuff like that. I think there's probably pretty much a consensus that it doesn't work very well if governments try to pick winners, individual firms, and to back them.
What we're suggesting is quite different—and this is broadly true of all the recommendations we're making—is that the role of government is not as a choice maker but a convenor, a catalyst, and sometimes an investor, but the notion is to draw on the expertise and the capabilities that exist in a lot of different organizations, whether in universities, companies, or civil society. A tremendous amount of expertise exists in the various dimensions of Canadian society. We're proposing a notion of government that draws this together, pools the best, and mobilizes it to address national issues.
On the issue about sectors, we're saying this has to be done on a collaborative basis, with a set of pretty clear criteria, which we've enumerated: things like the potential of a sector to have a significant impact on GDP growth, its capacity to create durable jobs, and what the global demand situation looks like for that sector's products and services. There needs to be some objectivity in the criteria that are used to address the concern you just raised.
Once a sector—we picked agrifood as an illustration, but it's just an illustration.... The notion is to convene a group of people from that sector and bring them together to address the issues facing that sector. Yes, maybe government has something to do with improving the way the sector is regulated or removing obstacles to growth or whatever, but the thought leadership of that work rests in the sector itself and government's role is just catalyzing that conversation.