That's perfect, thank you for the question. I'm glad you brought that up. If you hadn't, I would have.
As I mentioned at the start, in Canada approximately 7,000 different programs fund research, development, and innovation. It's significant. It's all across the board. There are multiple organizations and new programs come on stream constantly. The programs are not always connected. They're focused only on universities and research. As I mentioned in the opening statement, we have to delineate the two. They are two different activities. They're linked, but we need to fund both. That makes it very difficult for a mining company, for example, to invest in innovation. If you look at the statistics provided by the tri-council, the amount of money invested that is tracked and matched through tri-council programs is insignificant. I think the comparison is the same as dead languages. It's a scattered, large number of programs.
The Australian government chose four strategic areas for the government to invest in, and mining was one. Actually, it wasn't mining, it was METS, which is the mining and the supply chain sector, the whole system. They selected the METS sector as a critical area to invest in, number one. Number two, they made focused, direct investments of larger amounts of money in non-profit organizations, and they were not competitive, when you have to write proposals and compete and build transactional relationships. They were going to invest in the challenge defined by the industry.
For example, in Australia a couple of organizations called CRC ORE just received a new investment of $35 million. About $70 million in CRC ORE is now exclusively focused on processing. That was matched by mining companies, so the government is there with matching money, and mining companies say they can just go right in and throw their money on the table. It's that easy.
They have a similar one called Deep Exploration Technology CRC. The government said that exploration in undercover, etc., was very difficult. They were going to make a significant investment—I don't know the exact numbers, forgive me, I can try to find them—explicitly in exploration run by a third party organization led by industry. The most recent one was approximately 12 months ago. The Government of Australia and the Government of Queensland combined forces. I think the federal government put in $14 million, Queensland $6 million, for a total of $20 million over three years, to start a new organization called METS Ignited, which is doing essentially the same thing we're doing: building technology road maps for the industry, getting the supply chain hooked up, and moving forward to create a more sustainable industry and promote the development of new technologies for sale outside Australia.
It's very focused, run by industry-led organizations, third parties. Universities and others are involved, but they're not running it, so it's focused versus a competitive and a scattered approach.
Does that help?