Thank you very much.
There's no doubt we have a tendency to take the quality of our research and innovation ecosystem in Canada for granted. We often hear that Canada has the best universities and life is good. Without a doubt, we are very proud of the quality of our researchers and our students. However, the current reality is such that, when it comes to the number of citizens in Canada with a graduate degree, Canada is 28th in the OECD's rankings. People are very surprised when I tell them that. Why is Canada now ranked 28th?
One of the things we haven't done—and I think your committee has been a huge solution to that—is that we haven't spent enough time really keeping track. We built a good system, and then we said, “Okay, it's fine. We don't have to worry about it.” Meanwhile, the world kept changing, and we didn't sufficiently track the fact that we've fallen to a place where, if you look at the educational structure in the country, it does not correspond to the kind of high-value economy society that we need in the 21st century.
We can't imagine ourselves building this high-value economy and society, this world of intangibles, this world of adding value and building a sustainable and just future. We can't do that with the kind of investment that makes us look like we're on the path to being a kind of new colony in the 21st century, because we'll be so dependent on other countries.
As you know, when they look at us, it's going to be easy for them to just continue to see critical minerals now or see things in the ground, rather than seeing us, as we were talking about earlier, as a sovereign country with domestic capability that has a place on the world stage.