Good afternoon to you, gentlemen, and thank you for being here.
I have a question that could be of interest to several of you.
Mr. Lee-Gosselin, you mention the federal government's role and say that it should create the conditions that allow structural innovations to emerge.
I would like to share with you something I read about the Hydrogen Research Institute, a prestigious research centre in the riding of Trois-Rivières. The head researcher was voicing his concerns. He said that the significant decline in the price of gas and the economic crisis would lead to reduced investment in research. Hydrogen development was at a critical point. The researcher's analogy was that Europe would continue to have a strategic advantage over us because they do research there and they would do for hydrogen what they did for wind power. As a result, they will have the technology that we will have to buy.
You see what I am getting at. Do we need a major course correction in order to turn things around? Yes, we do. It took considerable effort to attract a university, let alone a hydrogen research institute, to the small city of Trois-Rivières, with its 130,000 citizens. However, things cannot grind to a halt just as the efforts are beginning to bear fruit.