Thank you. First of all, I want to say that I appreciate your presentation and the concern you show for Canadian workers and their jobs.
I couldn't agree more with Ken that we need to be discussing these important issues in the House of Commons, and we need to elevate these issues, because they're not on the radar screen. We owe it to Canadians and we owe it to Canadian workers to be talking about global competitiveness and to develop a strategy to make sure we keep jobs in Canada.
I also couldn't agree more--and it's music to my ears when I hear you speak, Mr. Garcia-Orgales--about the need for a sectoral industrial strategy, a strategy sector by sector. That's something that I've been speaking about for a while, so I'm very happy to hear you talk about that.
In some ways, this question has been answered in part, but I'd like to ask what incentives should be put in place to establish more manufacturing operations in Canada.
I have another question that relates more to research and development. Patents are a good measurement of research and development and are what actually leads down the road to commercialization. Canada doesn't even rank within the top fifteen in the world in terms of new patents being developed. In fact, we now rank thirtieth at patent filings per Canadian resident per $1 million of R and D spending. We rank behind Japan, the United States, China, Russia, India, Sweden, and Brazil, and when you look at the remarkable rate at which China and Korea are progressing, that threatens the manufacturing industry and other industries in this country.
So what incentives should be in place? As a broader question, in research and development, what are we missing? What can we do to stimulate or to shorten the lead time, to see new patents, to see commercialization of those proprietary products or knowledge?