My sense is that one thing that's been overlooked in recent years is what I like to think of as the guaranteed ROI, return on investment, of research, which is the development of talent. In other words, while we hope in our projects to have breakthroughs, the real benefit and ongoing enduring value of those projects is the people we produce out of them who end up leading across society. In recent years, there's been a bit of an emphasis on projects making new discoveries, which is great when they do. However, what's happened is that Canada has really let itself fall behind regarding the individuals who can really help us drive innovation across all sectors.
One thing that is really important in this is the fact that while Canada is often criticized for having, for example, a low level of business innovation and business expenditures on R and D for innovation, it's only in recent years, the last few, that the competitive pressure is now across all sectors. In my sense, all sectors are now attempting to adjust to this new world, a world in which we're driving towards net zero and a world in which we're driving toward handling far more appropriately in a very complex way the digital technologies. We've learned now that the digital transformation is a really complex phenomenon that underpins all aspects and is not simply a good thing. We have to learn about all sorts of aspects of handling that and optimizing it well.
My sense is that every business and every institution is now trying to move towards sustainability and trying to embrace a digitally enabled world, and I think, therefore, that innovation has gone to the top of the agenda. However, there's a huge talent gap now given the complexity of actually making that happen.