Frankly, I don't know why that clause is there, and I don't know within whose control it exists. I'd like to know that, and I'll try to find out.
But in terms of other issues, I would say that in general Canadian programs—not just the NCE program—take a long time to decide to do something.
Mr. Raymont mentioned this as well, where you have somebody having to write a 44-page document to get a couple of hundred thousand dollars. In research circles, it's often suggested that hundreds of people are competing for dozens of dollars.
The full proposal for the Australian CRC, the AutoCRC, was about 20 pages long, and the proposal for AUTO21 was three telephone books. Now again, I don't mind a searching, rigorous process, but it takes an awfully long time to get any answers on anything.
We're up for renewal next year, and I'm confident we're going to stomp all over this thing and do a great job. But it's going to really stall the progress of our organization for many months, going through the whole process of creating a new proposal and so on, and we have to kind of stop everything while we do that. Then there's a long decision-making process, and then the decision is announced.
The whole process will take almost 20 months. Yet we have a five-and-a-half-year track record; we have external audits, which are clean; we have an independent board of directors that's very demanding; and we have fully peer-reviewed researchers at 40 universities across Canada, supervising 500 graduate students who depend on this funding. Yet we're going to stall everything for 20 months while we decide whether or not to do it some more.
That's the kind of thing we run into.