You'd be amazed at how much research and development or product development goes on at the industrial level that you never hear about. We do it every day. We're looking at new chemistries in steel. We're looking at providing the same physical properties in a casting without using alloying material, which has become very expensive, and thus reducing the cost of our product and becoming more competitive in the marketplace.
We're doing that in a vacuum. We have talked to Dalhousie about partnering with their material science division and having our metallurgists work with the metallurgists there and sharing the facilities and doing a cooperative research study and developing a steel industry in Atlantic Canada again that will be self-sustaining.
We can't seem to get that off the ground. It may be as much my fault, because I'm so busy doing other things, but it would be great to have a liaison officer at the university who would wake me up every once in a while and say “Hey, Bob, you said you were going to do this and you haven't done it yet. Now why don't we get on with this partnership and make it work?”
Maybe that's a way of getting at it, having somebody there who would do an outreach program to industry and say this is what's available. It may be that government has done a great job of laying out those opportunities and funding, but I'm not aware of it. I know that ACOA provides opportunities in some of its programs and I know there's IRAP out there and other programs, but getting to it is what needs to happen. From my perspective, I would suggest to you that money put into that relationship, an R and D partnership between industry and the community colleges as well as the universities, would go a long way to improving our capability in doing what we do and developing new business.