Thank you very much, Mr. Cannings.
It would be a departure from our normal procedure. One of the great strengths, as in that MIT study, is the open nature of science in the United States and Canada. I think you have to tread carefully if you're going to come in with a legislative hammer on universities, which have lots of good reasons to want to be independent and autonomous.
I would rather argue that funding coming in really matters on the question of the subject matter. If the Chinese are helping the Canadian.... I happen to know a couple of researchers at the University of Alberta who came up, sometimes with their Chinese collaborators, with a vaccine for hepatitis C that will save, say, hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of lives. I don't think I really care where that money came from.
If the subject matter is a cutting-edge dual-use matter, that's another thing, and I think that's where it would probably have to be a mix of federal and provincial legislation. I know how sensitive the provinces are, quite legitimately, about education being in their domain. This would be a diplomatic and legislative nightmare, but don't let the perfect get in the way of the good. Sensitizing universities, sensitizing the researchers and sensitizing parliamentarians and the public has advantages and risks, and it is a mix of both—absolutely a mix of both.
One of the great strengths in the MIT study, if you choose to read it, is that it points out how few U.S. scientists have been graduated compared to China, but the secret sauce that the Americans have and that Canada has is all this great talent we harvest from overseas. Chinese, Indian, Iranian and even Russian researcher students come to us and bring their knowledge to us. That's one of the ways we make up for that lack of enough internal candidates for top research jobs.