I'll try to give you my perspective on that.
It's critical that our industry in particular, but also all industries in Canada, has a significant investment—and by “significant investment”, I mean that we need to get to the level of 5% to 10% of our sales dollars on an annual basis—invested in the development of new products and new processes.
We're not going to be able to change the fact that there are going to be competitive pressures on us from across the world, from lower-cost jurisdictions where products are made. What we can do, and where there is a significant advantage in Canada, is in applying initiative, applying the brain power that we have in this country, the education structure that we have, along with industry, to develop a new product that, through either intellectual property or just through technological advancement, we can maintain an advantage in.
We won't compete in the world by applying labour conversion costs at a lower rate than happens in the world. We will compete by coming up with new processes that allow us to have an advantage over parts of the world that cannot develop those things, or not as quickly, and by developing new products that have people chasing us, not us chasing the competition or not us having to try to figure out how to apply a lower labour cost where that's not practical in our economic structure.
What do we expect? What would we like to see out of government, pertaining to that? In my opinion, it's an expanded grant structure; more risk sharing, which was mentioned up front in the SR and ED approach; something that provides a partnership to industry to develop these competitive advantages, so that we can be effective in competing against the world.