The position papers were written by a team of scientists together with their partners from industry and the funding mechanisms. There is a compelling argument for why Canada has the capacity and how we can, with a reasonable investment, make a significant impact on all those issues—the energy shortage, climate change, and so on. You as politicians can support the strategic advancement. We will see at least 10 projects that will be awarded funding by Genome Canada in the next year. They will be moving some of this research forward.
What we need is a strategic and coordinated effort to develop a Canadian crop strategy to address climatic change and improvement of the food quality. Next year, there is additional funding coming through Genome Canada. This was provided by the federal government, and it was one of the most significant investments in science and technology that the government made last year. It was based on a well-stated socio-economic argument for why Canada can do this. They set targets: achieving a 25% crop yield improvement, addressing climate change and stress, making crops more robust, making crops so that we can use marginal land to produce food. These are all very real.
One of the gentlemen sitting with us today is a foremost scientist in this area. He is leading a team of 20 scientists at PBI, and they are just one component of a cluster who could lead Canadian efforts in this area.