Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for their opening statements.
Mr. Meier, I have questions for you.
It's great to see you again. I appreciate the number of tours you've provided to me to get a better sense of what we're doing in Winnipeg. Overall, I took away from those tours that polytechnics are very much leading the way in bridging the gap of advanced manufacturing in Canada by working with private sectors to commercialize one of these incredible Canadian ideas.
I want to ask you a bit about that because we're studying productivity. Our biggest competitor and biggest trading partner, of course, is the United States. As you know, its productivity has gone leaps and bounds ahead of ours over the last decade. In fact, as you may know, real U.S. manufacturing and construction are up by over 300% since 2008, and ours have been really flat during that time. U.S. firms invest triple what Canadian firms do in productivity-related technologies—about $12,800 annually per worker while we're at $4,100 annually per worker—so they really have advantages over our Canadian workforce.
I'm wondering what role polytechnics play in innovation and advanced manufacturing. How critical is it that we support that as taxpayers and as government to ensure that we can close the productivity gap with the United States?