Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for coming today. I'm sorry you had to put up with our family squabble this morning.
From my past life as an urban planning student, I find the information you've presented this morning fascinating. I'm always excited about the possibilities of sensor technology combined with crowdsourcing in changing the way we do land use planning and the way that we move around our urban and rural areas. There's great potential for this.
My question is more specifically about the government's procurement of Canadian innovation or the idea of homegrown innovation.
The expert panel, the Jenkins panel, was mentioned. It led a review of federal support for R and D and submitted this report to the government in October 2011. In its recommendations, it stated that the federal government spends billions of dollars every year in procurement of technologies and facilities, but that Canada ranks low internationally when it comes to using that purchasing power to encourage Canadian innovation. It seems to me to be common sense that the government should encourage homegrown innovation as part of its own procurement process, so I'm wondering if you can give us a sense of how Canadian innovation is or isn't a main criterion in the procurement of new technologies and facilities in your departments.