Absolutely.
Brian, you're right, I think it's becoming increasingly more of a hard sell to convince young people to enter the skilled trades, because there is a perception, and it's a correct perception, that it's a dying industry. Why become a machinist or a tool apprentice if the tooling industry or machine jobs won't exist ten years from now? The view is it would be a waste of their time and they're better off looking at other areas for them to find gainful employment.
One of the ways we think we could change that perspective, which would help us tremendously in terms of becoming more competitive globally, and I keep going back to this, is again through innovation and research. One of the impacts or effects of additional research and development, the development of innovation in terms of niche product development, is the creation of a different type of manufacturing economy.
One of the inadequacies that we see right now at the university level, our main vehicle for research in this country, is the fact that most research endeavours, such as a centre of excellence, even something like the MMO, are all driven by curiosity-based research. It's pure apply-type research. We need to focus more on a commercialization strategy where we are looking at developing innovations that we can bring to market. Every day Canada falls significantly farther behind countries like Germany, China, and India, where they focus their research efforts specifically on developing products that are new, innovative, and that can be brought to the global marketplace. That would help us attract young people into niche employment sectors because we will have niche products that are able to compete globally.
I can give you an example. Right now we are looking at a research opportunity with a university, and this particular university has just informed us that they're not interested. Why? Because it doesn't fit the academic or pure research criteria. However, there's a tremendous opportunity for global commercialization. It's a small investment but with incredibly high returns. What does that communicate to industry? That our infrastructure is not capable or supportive of what we need to do to create jobs, improve our economy, and make sure that young people have and can get the tools necessary to help us compete.