Thank you for your comments, Mr. Braid.
If I have said that the record of Canadian telcos in performing R and D was unsatisfactory, I may have misspoken. In point of fact, and I think this is going back to some work that I knew was being done in the 1980s and 1990s, the R and D of Canadian telecommunications carriers was to my mind not necessarily worse in terms of dollars per sale than that of carriers elsewhere in the world.
The important issue is what really encourages any company in Canada to do R and D. Clearly, if it's a private company, it's the opportunity to earn profits. Part of that is what the quality of the workforce is, what the quality of the tax system is, whether it penalizes, whether it favours. There's a host of things that promote an environment in which R and D is more or less likely to be done.
It's difficult to say with any precision that there's any one thing that would really be important in Canada, but one thing is clear. That is, that access to larger markets and customers helps. One thing that I think we haven't talked about is the reciprocity of Canadian companies being able to serve other markets and the risk that if we are in a meaningful way protectionist here, this might open up the potential for reciprocity elsewhere, so that successful Canadian companies would have trouble competing abroad. That certainly would discourage research and development at the margin.