One of the specific points was funding for pre-competitive collaborative activities, and those would be where several companies, such as the Boeings and the Bristols and potentially the Standard Aeros, would get together and look at pre-competitive technologies.
In the past in Canada, together with our comrades at the National Research Council, both in Montreal and in Ottawa, we have spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand what technologies industry would like to look at from the aerospace perspective. I'm specifically talking about composites and what we need to do to get industry to leapfrog ahead so they can actually understand and utilize the latest technologies. We spent a considerable amount of time putting these specific projects together. An example would be a fairing on a Boeing aircraft, utilizing a different material and process that would save weight and save cost.
Unfortunately, when we put the project together, we really didn't have the mechanism to take it forward. What I mean is that because it's pre-competitive, there wasn't an end company that would have direct benefit from it. There would be several end companies that would end up directly benefiting from it, and we couldn't find a funding mechanism to be able to basically put a grant together to fund some of the technologies. We looked at Industry Canada, and they had at that time the TPC, and now they have the SADI program. Either/or, we're looking at basically taking off and acting as a loan project, based on future sales to pay off that loan.
With these types of pre-competitive, collaborative activities, it's very difficult to tie in to future sales right back to this level of technology. So I think there was a gap, especially in the aerospace sector, to be able to fund or support these types of programs.