That's a very important question. The global landscape is changing in the sense that there's a bit of irony. Research has become much more collaborative between jurisdictions, between countries, and at the same time much more competitive. The results of research are communicated now with the speed of light. And countries, particularly the developing countries—China, India, Brazil, Russia—that in previous years were not strong competitors with western countries in terms of science and technology are very rapidly becoming competitors.
That's one of the reasons—referring back to the question about PhDs—that Canada used to be a destination of choice for foreign PhDs to pursue their careers, if they were looking for a country into which to immigrate. They can now return to their countries of origin and have very successful careers. So our dependence, for example, on foreign-trained PhDs, which we've had in the past, will no longer serve us well in the future.
So the landscape has become much more competitive. Canada has done extremely well in the past decade for many reasons, but the driving reason was the tremendous investment by the Government of Canada through all the various mechanisms you had appearing before you. The implication is, though, that it's not one-time only. In other words, you can't say, well, we took care of research, so now let's move on to other things. It's an ongoing requirement. It's much like education. You don't educate one group of children and then move on to something else. So if Canada is to maintain its position in the science and technology world, we will have to sustain the type and level of investments we have been making in the past number of years. That doesn't mean it goes up continuously, but it has to be sustained at a level that will sustain our enterprise.
