Thanks very much, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome to the witnesses.
It's been an honour for me to be able to work with both of you over the years, and I very much appreciate your commitment to universities, to students, and to manufacturing, and I hope that we can have some great discussions in the future as well.
With regard to the committee study, I think really where our universities and colleges come into play is with regard to analyzing the state of industrial innovation across Canada, in terms of our industry-academic collaboration. This is what we've been talking about, and you've had great examples of that in your innovation centres and business incubators and accelerators. Of course, we discussed the funding part with other groups earlier, so we more or less understand where that is coming from and what the needs are.
We were talking as well about global connectors and opportunities for us to branch out into different places and to collaborate. We've had an opportunity to go along on the Governor General's state visit to China and Mongolia. Our Governor General and the strength he has in representing universities definitely showed how our universities and the universities in the rest of the world closely work together. The same thing is true for our colleges and polytechnics, because they're trying to work to make sure we have opportunities for our students to learn, but also for that engagement that would take place later.
I'm wondering if you could just quickly talk a little bit about this collaboration, this global approach. Of course we know what the advantages are when you have people learning from others around the world, but could you just touch on that first, please?