I can't tell you. I don't represent industry. I think you have to go and consult with industry: Perrin Beatty's organization, people like that; or in particular, CAPP and the coal guys; the EDG; some of the people who are specifically--and I use this word in a totally non-pejorative sense--lobby groups for the industry and can speak more directly for industry than I can.
But I do believe in free enterprise, and I believe if you provide the right environment they will move relatively quickly to do so; they will move quickly to take advantage of that. I think the big issue is that we can't expect the private sector to ramp up its R and D to get to that three to one in five years--in ten years, probably. What we could do, and I really would like to suggest this for consideration, is have more of the government-funded R and D programs have more private sector pull and governance. Because frankly, I'm not going to name names, but I'm aware of many government labs that industry says are like another university. They get money and they work on what they want to work on. Yes, sometimes it has some relevance to an industry problem, but in other cases it has very little relevance, and they publish papers in journals and they get promoted on the basis of that.
It's purely a personal opinion, but that's not my view of what government should be delivering there. You should be risk sharing with the private sector. One way you could do that and increase the R and D is that while the money itself initially wouldn't come from the private sector, it at least would have the appearance of being private sector money because it would be private sector governed, and the focus of attention and the focus of spending would be on private sector problems and issues.
So that would be a transition method to start that going. If you then found that the government was cost sharing, I think there are ways--and again, it's for those in the finance department who are more expert than I in policy--that the private sector could be required to step up to more R and D, and would step up to more R and D if there was the kind of environment where instead of the moneys being here and here, they saw it more as “Let's put them in a pot in the middle.”
But at the moment, you have government spending and you have private sector spending, and there's not enough of it in the middle.