Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I want to follow up on what Dr. Carrie was saying. I think the concept of taking basic research and commercializing it was tried, actually. I checked that with one of the past Industry deputy ministers. We had done that. It was a part of Technology Partnerships Canada, where basic biomedical research was linked with the private sector. It was run by an arm's-length body, and there was a matching of funds. It did work. It was a 10-year project. It was canceled in 2007, which is unfortunate, because it was providing enormous amounts of venture capital. All the private sector wanted to be involved, all the industry wanted to be involved in getting this to the market. That is a model that was proven to be successful over 10 years and can be used again.
I want to go to something very different. Everyone talks about “little Canada” and how we can play a major role. Canada has a distinct advantage in this kind of research in that we are the only country in the world with such a diverse population that has all the information about patients in one insuring body, which is the provincial public administrator. In the United States, you cannot translate that from private industry, because of privacy laws. Here we have a unique ability to do translational research. We should be seizing that, running with it, because it gives us an advantage, not just in whether we're bright or not bright, but because of our population base and our national public health care system.