Thank you very much for that question.
As you may know, I'm a long-term university professor, and I've also looked after one of the federal research councils. What I've been struck by in the last 25 years of active involvement in this sector is the extent to which a commitment to building a better future for Canada in a changed world has really involved a bipartisan commitment to investing in the best and brightest. We saw this. Earlier today there was mention of the Liberal government's initiatives in terms of the Canada graduate scholarship and so on. That was followed by the Conservative government's leadership in terms of the Bantings and the Vanier fellowships, and the Canada excellence research chairs and so on. There has been a long-term commitment to say that Canada will survive in the 21st century by having the human capital to help us move forward.
What's happened, I think, in the last number of years is that this long-standing commitment has kind of been taken for granted a bit. We haven't realized that, in an international and competitive world, given inflation and so on, we cannot lose focus. This is something that must be considered a priority for the country, year in and year out.
My sense is that a lot of your work here at this committee, and certainly what the witnesses have been saying, is really bringing it to our attention that this plan, this commitment, of building a Canada based on human capital rather than simply what we have in the ground is now more important than ever. In a changed global context, a world of the intangible economy and a world in which all countries are trying to move up the value chain in terms of a higher level of economic activities, we must double down, in fact, on this bipartisan strategy that Canada pursued successfully until fairly recently.