In terms of government and federal agencies, we'll launch a lot of our projects in our Canadian system, simply because there are existing programs and facilities and infrastructure that are easy to access. Without going into specific programs or policies, one institution that has been there for decades—my entire professional life—has been NSERC, which sponsors basic research at the university and even at the national lab and research institution level.
NSERC programs exist that make it very easy for us to tap into extremely talented young people and their professors, and leverage what I'll just call the research culture, because it's not just universities. That's something we try very hard to take maximum advantage of.
That's an example of a program that is hitting on a lot of cylinders, because one of the things we desperately need is talented young people. As an industry we were shrinking through the last 10 years. We did not take up new talent as quickly as we should have, so we ended up with a bit of a logistics nightmare, wherein we have a whole bunch of people retiring, we have an empty middle, and we're trying to fill the front end of the pipeline. That's why the federal support for basic engineering and postgraduate engineering and science, and the facilitation of industry being able to collaborate with those people in-between or during their studies, through internship programs, are fantastic.
Policy-specific programs that are very useful are programs such as NRCan's IFIT and the new clean growth program, as I understand them. We're trying to actively leverage those, and they specifically go after certain policy objectives. We've found over the years that the best way to leverage that is to see how we align with the policy objectives. For the most part, we do.
For example, we've utilized the IFIT program, which is an NRCan program. The IFIT program recognizes that the critical gap, at least in Canada, was not so much the research and development, which was excellent, but that next stage. How do you take this and go into a demonstration-deployment phase?
Where policy could help is by identifying where the gaps and weaknesses are and encouraging industry and corporations such as ours to collaborate and partner in taking risks in those directions.