If I could take a moment and pick up about the trend for the future population that's going to populate our companies, what we're very worried about--and as a matter of fact in Montreal Aéro Montréal is working on an analysis of this as well--is the future population. If you're a young student right now going into engineering on one side of the equation you have a lot of money being spent on infrastructure so you might say, I guess I should go into civil engineering because there's a lot of money going into that area. But the engineering population for us is extremely important. For these three companies that are here right now, engineering is the core of what we do in research. The reason we invest close to $20 million a year in 16 to 18 universities is because we have to work with these students. If there's one message that the aerospace caucus could work on, it's to help the future population of workers understand that this is important. It's not only at the university level but at the colleges, the training, and so on. I just want to emphasize that.
If you want to see a jewel in Canada, by the way, right now you can go to the British Columbia Institute of Technology, which is just a five-minute cab ride from the airport in Vancouver. You'll see an absolutely state-of-the-art facility that is phenomenal. It's got aircraft given by Bombardier. It's got engines given by Pratt & Whitney. It's got investments by Honeywell and others. It's got a control room for air traffic controllers, etc. So that's the future population. One of the things we fear, and we fear very much, and I'm sure for the auto sector it's the same thing.... The auto sector is down, so somebody who's studying is saying they're not going to go into that area, the aircraft repair or whatever it is, and that's not the case.
The fact is, and Claude Lajeunesse said it very well, that the long term looks very good for our industry, and it's an industry that's very important. If you look at the average salaries in the industries and that sort of stuff, it's about $82,000. That's about the average salary of those in the aerospace industry. That's a lot of very skilled labour. I don't want to extend that too much more than to say an important role for the political process, in the speeches and so on, is to really help the students understand that there is a future. In 2001 Pratt & Whitney invested with the government at $400 million a year. We came out of that as the leading producer of engines in the small to medium-size engines because we looked at it from the future. This is what we're doing now as an industry. This is what the companies with me are doing.