I can, definitely, if I can remember them.
The first item was why a disproportionate amount of our research and effort is going into Canada. I would say that, looking from the top down at the government agencies on a federal and provincial level and also at the universities, it is easier to deal with all of the agencies and institutions and individual researchers. I personally believe that socially—and this is represented in the government—more value is attached to the forest-based industry in Canada than to the one in the United States.
As an example, I remember a debate in which we were saying that the U.S. spends $1 billion a year on nanoparticle research. The forest products industry in the U.S. still represents 7% of GDP, so it should be able to get $50 million to $100 million a year in research support for nanocrystalline cellulose and nanoparticles from the forest, where we have an enormous advantage, and yet it can't, because they'd rather put the money in other places.
I believe that Canada is a better environment to work in because of the values that are placed on forest-based industry by government, society, and university professors.
PPGTP stands for pulp and paper green transformation program. It was a short-term program, I believe two-year. In response to certain policy aberrations in the United States, Canada had to step up to the plate to level the playing field. Essentially this is an example of very targeted support of improvements that were not necessarily transformational in terms of generating a whole new class of products or bringing us into a new century. It was blocking and tackling basic kinds of things, and it was focused on energy improvements and improvements in environmental performance. The dollars were extremely focused.
It caused a significant amount of capital investment, and there was excellent follow-up on the program as well, in which they looked at the benefits accrued by this supported investment. It caused companies to do good projects that they otherwise wouldn't have done but that should have been done.
The moral of the story there is that while we're all very interested in developing entirely new applications and products and moving up the value chain, it's absolutely essential to have an element of this work that looks at the most fundamental things we deal with, which are thermodynamics, energy efficiency, and things like reliability—very fundamental things.
We come back to this discussion about fundamental things versus project funding.