Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our guests for joining us today.
One of the questions I've had is about—and I'm going to bring in some government policy changes in the budget that tie into this—a $800-million fund that is specifically for clusters and innovation centres and it appears at this point it's going to be in a major urban centre. I don't need to go through what those are, you guys know what those are.
I'm in an interesting riding. It's in Barrie, Ontario, and we have Georgian College, Lakehead University, York, University of Michigan, I believe, and one New York university there as well. We've been struggling because we do not have a centre for innovation where the goal is to build clusters and to work with local industry to expand, but some of this has happened by itself. We have a lot of data centres, etc., coming to town.
My question relates back to the item that's on the floor that while it might be easy for these types of clusters to expand in major urban centres, there's a gap in our mid-tier cities. How do we take somebody who's come up with a piece of software or an innovation in a place like Barrie and actually help them approach the point of commercialization and help them get to a point where they're going to be successful? There have been some successes locally, but it takes years compared to what should take months in a major urban centre.