Of course, I might be speaking out of turn, and I might have some ideas wrong. I say that because CNL is a large place, and we have a fairly focused access to them. We deal with the hydrogen people and we deal with some others, but there are a lot of things going on that we don't deal with. I shouldn't generalize in any case.
The way I see it is that CNL now is being forced to lend out its services almost as a private industry. In other words, it will perform a certain act at whatever they can get in terms of money for that act. There's some sense in that, of course, because it makes it financially viable.
Personally I think that's wrong, because I think CNL provides an opportunity for the Government of Canada to feed very good information. There are a lot of very smart people at CNL, and they have a lot of good equipment that most small companies—no small companies, I think I'm probably right in saying—could possibly provide themselves. That access can spawn industries—small industries, perhaps, but small industries add up. Take the helium-3 we're talking about. It's a small industry that's not huge, but it would add up and it's high tech.
By the way, we do that with a number of things. We've been developing electrolyzers with CNL. We've been developing electrolyzers that are tritium-compatible. That's what makes them so original. But because of that we have developed what is sometimes being referred to by others as a robust electrolyzer that could be used for hydrogen and perhaps that also has spinoff advantages.
We are very interested in tritium and tritium handling. These are big things, though, and they are extremely expensive for us. We need not only the technical support and the encouragement but also financial support. We can't pay CNL prices that are four and five times the prices that we use in our own offices. We can't get far enough that way, and we can't make those kinds of commitments. We don't have it. It's not possible.
If the Government of Canada wants to take advantage of an expanding industry this way—and the right kind of industry, as far as I'm concerned, because high tech is good work, that's long-term work and it's what we want to do—why don't we focus some funds and a lot of energy into the smaller companies? They could focus, not on the bigger ones who are going to just design and build what we've already got, but on the smaller ones that are developing bubble technology, tritium lights, or the numerous other possibilities. Why don't they spend more time on doing that?
That's what I mean when I say they are going the wrong way. They have some great people. They are very easy to talk to. They have lots of capability and knowledge to give. Why don't they give it, not sell it?