It is important that we maintain continuity. That's definitive.
However, if you we were to look at the history of IDRC over the last 46 years, there are four common threads: agriculture, health, economy, and science.
If I look at the policy of the Canadian government over the last 15 years, food security and agriculture has been there and health in various forms has also been there. I think the thematic focus is not necessarily challenging, but what is more challenging is the continuity. In my business, if we are not working on long term we're dead.
We have to make the case all the time to our shareholders, to you in Parliament and other Canadians, and worldwide, that an investment in research may not pay now, but it might pay in a few years down the road and it may also have an impact that is not foreseen.
This Ebola vaccine, when it was tested in Guinea, the Guineans didn't want to be told by Canadians and westerners what to do. They brought in a team from Mali and by pure coincidence this team from Mali was trained by an IDRC grant, a Canadian government grant, on HIV vaccine trials. So the Malians were teaching the Guineans how to do it and the Guineans were successful in this ring vaccination process. That's an illustration of continuity.