I appreciate what John is saying, but at the end of the day, we do make choices. You have to. As individuals we have to make choices, and as governments we have to make choices. So it's not really possible to say “Let's just create a policy that lets whoever emerges win” unless you create it equally for everybody. But that is not going to happen, and we all know that. We've already seen what the U.S. is doing and what Japan is doing.
So I think what you have to look at is getting as much information as you can. The Council of Canadian Academies has a report, and it's recommended to the government what the top areas of investment should be. I'm happy to say hydrogen and fuel cells is one of the top five in that category. So use that source of information.
Look at what the private sector is doing. What is one of our national objectives? It's that the private sector pick up the burden of R and D. Okay, well look around at which sectors are investing in R and D. In the hydrogen and fuel cell sector, 85% of all R and D is private sector. That sector should be rewarded for that kind of behaviour.
So I'd use those criteria, and at the end of the day, you pick winners and losers. We've already done it with ethanol and $2.2 billion, and that's an intelligent choice based on our abundance of resources, as you point out.
So pick your top five or top seven, and then create the strategies and the policies that will support the commercialization and success of those technologies.