Thank you for the question.
You are correct in saying that artificial intelligence is very important, especially in Quebec. In my opinion, and the member can confirm this, all the superclusters have an artificial intelligence component.
It's such an important platform, especially in the aerospace sector. There's such enormous opportunity. This is a non-partisan issue, and I'd like to give the previous government kudos as well. Since 2005 and up until now, there has been close to half a million dollars' worth of investment in artificial intelligence. Some of that started with Mr. Martin's government and continued on with Mr. Harper's government. Then we really stepped up under Mr. Trudeau's government, most recently with the $125 million for the pan-Canadian framework for artificial intelligence.
The logic is very simple. We have great strengths in Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, Waterloo, and Edmonton. We have pioneers in artificial intelligence like Rich Sutton. We have Geoffrey Hinton from U of T. We have Yoshua Bengio from Montreal. Too often we compete against each other. The objective of our government is to determine how we can actually collaborate our AI, artificial intelligence, initiatives and our power to bring people together so they can work together as opposed to fighting for resources and competing against one another.
That's what we're seeing in the supercluster initiative, the supergrappes initiative. It's really about collaboration, and I think there are enormous benefits in that area, particularly in the aerospace sector.