It's quite true. I wouldn't call it a gap, actually. I'd say it's a system that's developed over decades now. There are probably only a handful of companies that develop large generation facilities. You could count them on one hand: General Electric, Siemens, Alstom, Hitachi, right? Those are huge manufacturing companies that build the kind of equipment that power plants need, which is enormous and very small in volume, small in terms of the number of them required to power, say, even the North American industry.
The relationship has been very synergistic over the past and continues to be that way. Those companies do invest in research and development, they do make their money designing, developing, and building large-scale generation technologies. That, in most cases, would be uneconomic for utility companies to do. There are smaller examples of investment in R and D and smaller technologies, but, as I pointed out in my testimony, most of the work of utilities is around using those technologies efficiently and lowering the costs of doing so.
I think that's a good synergy, I think that's a good situation. I don't actually believe Canada needs to get into the manufacturing business in any significant way here. That's a workable mechanism globally, quite frankly.
