As you may have noted, at the front end we approach the overall mission of the department using a triangle, because we believe that each of the three major volets of the department are interconnected and reinforce each other.
The fair and efficient competitive marketplace is fundamentally the framework. It's the baseline. If we don't get this right, nothing else will matter.
In that context, the government launched the panel chaired by Red Wilson, which looked at a number of initiatives that could be taken to enhance the competitive marketplace. These were adopted by the government and passed in the previous budget, which led to changes and improvement in regard to the Competition Act and the Investment Canada Act.
There are other areas that we are currently working on, such as copyright, intellectual property, that tend to reinforce the competitive marketplace. Other initiatives include the recently held auction for new spectrum, which permitted a number of new market entrants to bring product to market.
So that is our table stakes: if we don't get this right, if we don't keep improving and making sure that we have a fair, efficient, and competitive marketplace, then the rest will not work as well.
In terms of the innovative economy, a number of initiatives have been undertaken to support this. A couple of days ago, as a matter of fact, Minister Clement launched the digital economy strategy, which is at the next wave of initiatives.
Looking back, the government launched the Canada Excellence Research Chairs program, which was designed to bring to Canada 20 of the top-notch researchers in specific fields, so that if we can bring talent.... These were unique chairs of $10 million each. The results should be announced shortly.
This was a worldwide competition. We were able to establish a worldwide panel, which included the president of the University of Hong Kong and the dean of engineering from the University of Cambridge.
So we are going to be able to bring to Canada 19 or 20 top-notch scholars.
We have the Vanier scholarships, which again are bringing to Canada top-notch students. It will be on a par at some point, we hope, with the Rhodes scholarship in terms of its quality and the amount that we bring to it.
Overarching all of this, however, is the science and technology strategy, which identified key areas that the government should invest in and on which we are getting gradual buy-in from other provinces as they also start focusing on those similar areas to establish critical mass.
Overall in terms of an innovative economy, there's an evolution from what it was 10 or 15 years ago to an area where there's concentration in key areas that will be the platform for Canada's future economic growth.