Industry committee  I actually testified five or six years ago.

Industry committee  Thank you very much. It's an honour and a pleasure to be here. In my brief, which I'll be referring to in my testimony today, I introduce the AUTO21 network of centres of excellence, which is one of over 20 networks of centres of excellence funded by the Canadian federal governm

Industry committee  AUTO21 does quite a lot of work on energy-related issues in manufacturing both to improve the energy efficiency of processes and to develop new materials that will basically take weight out of the car and yet retain safety, which is a critical issue; and that will impact the ener

Industry committee  I think before more funding is applied, a more effective program design has to be developed.

Industry committee  AUTO21 has done a great deal of research in both magnesium and aluminum. We have worked on new casting and forging processes for these materials. We have worked on sheet aluminum and sheet magnesium, which would allow the production of very lightweight body structures. The key is

Industry committee  Thank you very much for your question. First of all, you're right. The OEMs, the automakers, are foreign owned, but what has been found--and this has been the case for a long time, and each of the OEMs is a little different in this respect--is that of the five companies, the Can

Industry committee  Let me preface my remarks by saying I'm not an expert in economics or in trade. But I will tell you this, from my observations of the automotive sector around the world--sorry, I would also say I'm a taxpayer, so I have a problem with excess spending. That's why I keep emphasizin

Industry committee  Different things have happened, I think, but from my questions of networks in their second phase, they generally wind down fairly quickly after the end of the second phase. A lot of activities continue, which is very worthwhile, but I think it becomes difficult to maintain the ti

Industry committee  Again, I'm afraid I'm not an expert in policy abroad, but from what I see, they seem to have a systemic approach to everything. I had a minute with the former prime minister of Finland in Kyoto a couple of years ago at a conference, and I asked, how did you transform Nokia from a

Industry committee  Well, that's right. I think that's likely, and it may even be that they could leave the country for better funding elsewhere.

Industry committee  Very briefly on Finland, Finland has 5.6 million people who speak a language nobody else speaks. They are really isolated. They are economically dominated by huge countries all around them. Their weather is even crummier than ours. But they've done really well because they just d

Industry committee  Frankly, I don't know why that clause is there, and I don't know within whose control it exists. I'd like to know that, and I'll try to find out. But in terms of other issues, I would say that in general Canadian programs—not just the NCE program—take a long time to decide to do

Industry committee  They certainly do in AUTO21. Our federal grant—and let me say I think it's a superb program, that the NCE program is absolutely great—is $5.8 million per year, which, when it was awarded in 2001, was 96% of what we asked for. So we were absolutely thrilled to get it. At the tim

Industry committee  I would agree with that, and perhaps even go further. In my view, what the government should do is determine, in consultation with key stakeholders, what the goals of the enterprise are. What's the outcome that we want to achieve? I would suggest that it's a workforce that is abl

Industry committee  Thank you very much. I won't reiterate the mission of the NCE program, I'll just get right into it. The challenges facing AUTO21 are the same as those facing Canada's automotive sector. We have to figure out how to maximize innovation within the available budget to keep our cou