Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to both witnesses today. You bring very interesting and different perspectives to this important discussion, and I thank both of you for being here.
Being from the Waterloo region, I will be directing my questions to Professor Karim.
Also, I wanted to refer to MP Williams' earlier questions with respect to venture capital or whatever. We have invited Chris Albinson, the CEO and president of Communitech, to be a future witness. I did a round table recently. He has all those answers for you. I'm going to focus on IP, but I really hope he is able to come, because there is a lot of information there about venture capital and how it's working and all of those things.
In looking at the IP perspective, Professor Karim, could you comment on how the newly announced ElevateIP program helps address some of the challenges facing IP? Right now, it is funding these hubs across the country, and I'm glad that they go from out west down to Halifax as well. How is that going to help companies ramp up? As you know, the challenges are always in the ramping-up process, it seems, not in the starting-up process.