Again, I'm an optimist and I'm a booster for Canadian research and innovation. We can be really proud.
I grew up in the sixties and seventies. Where do you find Canadian success? We have a whole track record of success, both on research and on innovation.
This is Canadian Innovation Week, and one of the things we like to say is the innovation comes from discovery and research. Canada has had a challenging history of developing into commercializable research, and this government has taken important actions through the creation of the new innovation agency, which is a good step. It is a century-long problem of attracting private investment into the research enterprise in Canada. There will always be a role for government.
When we look at our international competitors, the U.S. levels of private sector investment research are much higher. When we look at the U.K., Japan and Korea, they're much higher. Is it a combination of tax measures? Is it grant measures? What do we do to attract them?
The innovation agency will be one partial step, but again, it's one of those things where we have to do more than one thing at one time. This is because the emphasis on immediate innovation and what's commercializable is at the expense of this generation of young researchers, who will be part of the next AI, the next quantum and the next EV.