Transport committee  Let me start by giving you a vague answer, which I apologize for. I can certainly follow up with more specifics. I'm happy to do that, and I'll work through the clerk's office, just to be clear. I would suggest Canada ranks higher in public investment research than we do in industrial, if you use the OECD country yardstick, but I don't have the numbers as to where we rank, although we can certainly access those and make sure the committee is made aware of them.

Transport committee  At the bottom line, there are a number of obstacles, including the economics of how quickly and how competitively we can introduce new technology to the private sector and the access the private sector has to the work we do and the work the academics do. I would argue that we have a somewhat fragmented innovation system in this country.

Transport committee  The simple answer is yes. When I was talking about the three aspects of the technological advancements that can take place—the game changers, the things that are already in stream, and the legacy fleet—the latter two both involve the internal combustion engine. It can be the engine itself—and there is work going on there—or the automobile that the engine is driving, because it has to be looked at as a full unit, obviously.

Transport committee  The two subjects...as a matter of fact, all three that I've talked about—electric vehicles, lightweighting, and the natural gas road map—are focused on the on-road vehicles at this point in time. We're not involved in the rail or marine or aircraft areas at the moment. Taking a segue, if I might for just a moment, one of the things we are looking at in the context of the natural gas road map is other modes of transportation that might take advantage of natural gas being a cleaner fuel than conventional diesel or gasoline, but that work has not started yet.

Transport committee  No, that's not in my sphere of responsibility. I do know that GE has developed an electric train engine, largely for the demonstration of the capacity to do it. They've got it on their research campus in Albany, New York. You can actually see an electric train do its job as a full-size engine, but I'm not involved in any research that would take that forward.

Transport committee  I certainly concur with what Ian has said. If you dig into the innovative activities of the federal government laboratories, the ones that are primarily in the non-regulatory role, you'll find that the integration with the industry is—I don't know what kind of timeframe to put on it, whether it's five or 10 years—getting stronger and stronger all the time.

Transport committee  I can't speak to that. I don't know. I do know that there's lots of work on lightweighting going on that has the potential to be in the marketplace. Whether somebody has something hidden away in a backroom, I don't know; certainly, we don't.

Transport committee  Canada has an awful lot of coal—

Transport committee  —and “clean coal” is actually a term that's now gaining recognition in the context of two particular technological innovations. One is how you burn it: the pressure, the temperature, and whether it's with or without oxygen. A number of combustion experiments are going on to try to fine-tune how the coal is actually burned.

Transport committee  Yes, I will, happily. The cold weather in Canada has a number of impacts on a conventional vehicle, but the specific reference I was making was to batteries and battery life—battery durability—in the context of an electric vehicle. There is a testing centre in northern Ontario where vehicles are left out in the miserably cold winter weather and then tested according to standard.

Transport committee  That That's the lightweighting. Yes.

Transport committee  That's a bit of a tough question. I'm not sure I can put a quantification on it. Part of it has to do with how long the existing fleet is going to stay on the road and how far ahead the equipment manufacturers are in things that are already in queue, such as the direct injection technology for gasoline, for instance.

Transport committee  I'll take the first response and let my colleagues add to it. That's why I am such a champion of the road map approach: because it involves—as in the case of electric vehicles, for example, or in the case of natural gas, the two I've left for your consideration today—the OEMS, the original equipment manufacturers.

Transport committee  The technology road map I described gives you the flavour of all of the partners playing. We've taken the same approach on trying to figure out how we implement the recommendations that come from the road map. You've actually picked on one that's quite specific, the codes and standards.

Transport committee  I can't give you a specific dollar value on each of the items in the road map by example, but I would point out that the Government of Canada is certainly one of the investors. The chart that I gave you talks about the federal government investments, as you point out, but there are moneys in academia and there are moneys in industry.