Thank you very much. Now it's my turn.
I really appreciate your honest, direct comments about the problems with these agencies, but I want to ask you a more general question. It doesn't mean that I haven't absorbed your more specific points.
As you know, earlier this week, the report of the expert panel on federal support for R and D came out and made a number of recommendations.
Just today--and this relates to the earlier discussion about Canada's poor level of R and D--one of my colleagues proposed that we have a goal for business expenditure on R and D that the government adopt, and then it could use these expert panel recommendations to help figure out how to achieve that goal. Right now, Canada's business expenditure on R and D is extremely poor. It's 1.0% of GDP, whereas the average for the OECD is 1.6% of GDP.
My colleague suggests that Canada should have a goal to get to the average of the OECD by 2015. It's extremely ambitious to go from 1.0% to 1.6% of GDP in four years, so never mind the exact goal, but I have two questions I'd like to ask each of you.
Do you think it's a good idea to have a stretch target goal on increasing business expenditure on R and D? Second, if so, partly in light of this expert panel, what tools or mechanisms do you think would be best for the government to use to try to achieve such a goal?
Who wants to go first?