To start at a high level, investments in innovation is a key part to how you can address the productivity challenges. What the government has been doing, and partly through advice that we're providing, is trying to figure out how we can get better outcomes from the money that we support in terms of investments that are made by the private sector.
We're trying to, as John was mentioning, turn early stage R and D into commercial products that are developed and manufactured in Canada.
When David Emerson did his report on aerospace, one of his key conclusions was that there was a lack of federal programs in the space between basic R and D and commercialization, or what he called the valley of death. There's a lot of federal programming at the front end and some in the back end. One of his key conclusions was that we needed to have more programming that allows companies to make those difficult and costly, and leap of faith investments between the early to that.... He recommended, and the government did adopt that recommendation, to create a technology demonstration program. It's about trying to bring those innovations and trying to increase productivity.
The other part of it is about trying to get better value for the dollars. One of the key criteria for that program is about trying to demonstrate that you're working with a supply chain and that you're also working with academia. You're trying to make sure that the R and D has better value than just to one firm and you're trying to widen that out.
That's just one sector. In space through the same report, but in a different volume, he recommended that the Canadian Space Agency double its investments in terms technology and investments in industry. That recommendation was also adopted by the government.
In the auto sector, which was talked about earlier, the initial tranche of money, $250 million that was announced in 2008, was over-subscribed and the government has since made two announcements about topping up that fund. That's geared towards trying to bring better innovation in the auto sector. A number of OEMs and some key Canadian suppliers have taken advantage of that to increase our productivity.