Thanks, Chair. It's great to be on this committee. I see Ms. Young is visiting this committee. I think it's good that we visit each other's committees sometimes to find out what's going on as MPs.
Recently a group of us, an all parliamentary group, went to a place called Eindhoven, the Netherlands. This was Philips Electronics' main city, but they've changed the whole city around to an innovation centre. It was amazing to see all the creativity. All these companies send their people there to do research and study. They would socialize. They even encouraged trading secrets, trading patents. They were coming out with almost a patent a day. One would say maybe one a month would really make it happen. It was great to see that synergy. Synergy leads to economic activity. We see it in RIM in Waterloo and maybe in Silicon Valley in California.
Our health system is kind of a hybrid of the American and European systems. Today everybody is talking about how we can have more innovation and technology to help us. Looking at that model, are we missing something here in North America because of the size of our economy? Do we have to let the Americans take the lead on this, or is there an opening for Canada to create this synergy? The Netherlands only has 10 million people and they're creating this synergy just by partnering with private companies and public money. Is there room for us to create that synergy and innovation and economic activity in the health care system? It's going to be key for North America's ageing population in the next 50 years.