Yes, definitely.
If you look across the country, it's an industry, as I indicated at the outset, that has clusters in every single province, usually built around universities or research institutes. It builds on the infrastructure we've already put in place and the investments that we've put into our universities.
As for the companies themselves, if you look across the country and take some examples, you have AbCellera, which had a fantastic IPO during the pandemic. You have Notch Therapeutics and Zymeworks, which are Vancouver companies. You have Repare in Montreal and Medicago in Quebec City. These are companies that, with these investments, as their technologies become more proven and get closer to being commercial, will be employing hundreds of people. We're talking about very skilled, highly paid jobs. We're talking about people who are coming out of our universities and colleges, technical colleges, with very significant skill sets—Ph.D.s in science. We've put all those investments into the STEM programs, and this is going to be the receptor capacity for those people.
When we talk about some of the jobs, we're talking about millions of dollars that are going into these companies. The technologies they're working on will eventually create large-scale companies. We'd like to create anchor companies in Canada where we have companies here in this country that are globally competitive.
You can take as an example RIM BlackBerry and look what that did for the Kitchener-Waterloo area. If you create some anchor companies in the space, the spinoffs and further investments will lead to a sort of fantastic cycle that just attracts more investment, attracts more people and grows.
The enormous potential the sector presents is just fantastic. Even during the pandemic, when times were tough, investment kept flowing and the companies kept growing.