Mr. Chair, I absolutely support increasing investments in research and have advocated this from the first day that I walked into this job, and even before. My position on this is very clear.
The Bouchard report has done a great job at providing us with an update on the issues and the challenges we face and the potential solutions. I would like to say that whether we should be adding 10%, or 5%, or 20% is a matter of priorities and calculations.
What I'd like to see us doing is committing to an ambitious target—not even an ambitious target, but a target. For example, we could say that Canada in five years should meet the average of the OECD, or be in the median of the G7 countries in terms of investments in research, and work from there. Reverse-engineer what we need to be doing.
This needs to be dynamic. If we increase by 10%, and others increase by 50% or 20%, then in a few years we're going to be here having exactly the same conversations.