Sure. Thank you very much.
First of all, I agree that the progress made in the last 10 years has been important to Canada, and important to our social, human, and economic progress. I think we have to, if anything, ramp up investment in basic research.
The reason I was asking the question on whether there is an area of focus within environmental technologies is because part of the success with the relationship between universities such as Stanford in Silicon Valley, as an example, is that there is a great deal of cooperation at the outset in terms of overall focus over the next 5, 10, or 15 years in terms of what the venture capital community believes to be the best opportunity. The collaboration does not begin when the stuff comes out; it begins in terms of prioritizing how your granting councils and others will consider what you actually find most meritorious.
Firms such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, or Khosla Ventures, and others are making decisions on cleantech, for instance. They're focusing on wave power, various next generations of solar, carbon dioxide capture and storage, or cellulosic next-generation biofuels, but they're making a decision in terms of what silos have the greatest opportunity--water purification and reclamation, toxic site cleanup--and they're making those kinds of decisions.
You said that CFI does not have that kind of focus at the outset. It's basically what applications come forward, and then you determine what is meritorious. I would assert that it makes an awful lot of sense for you and for governments to consider a slight change in that approach and to actually express that we are greatly interested in particular silos where Canada can be a global leader, and to actually engage the private sector at that stage as well—not to micro-manage individual projects, but to at least directionally provide that kind of leadership.