Finance committee  Sure. I'm fully supportive of transparency in everything that gets done. Absolutely.

Finance committee  On your previous question about the colleges and polytechnics, we did start to work with them last year. We started a small project, a program. We're very encouraged by that, and that's precisely one of the points of our expansion. The first project we did was with Saskatchewan

Finance committee  Yes. In budget 2017 we got the increase.

Finance committee  Of course, it was a contribution agreement, and that got ramped up.

Finance committee  I'd like to echo what my colleague said. The point here for us is we have thousands of students entering universities and colleges, and what kind of future are they going to have if they are not learning the skills that companies will expect? Companies are no longer really trai

Finance committee  No, our headquarters is still in Vancouver.

Finance committee  We have offices in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. That's an arm's-length committee of the board of directors, which is made up academics, industry people and government people. It's very important for us to have scientific integrity for the adjudication decisions. They come back

Finance committee  I would say it's research that has an economic impact. As a mathematician, I can tell you that very abstract ideas from number theory are used every day when you use your ATM. That spectrum goes in that direction.

Finance committee  To your first comment, actually B.C. does extremely well. It does well beyond its per capita, because we started in B.C. We also have a good presence in Alberta. We could do more. Manitoba has increased its funding. We depend on the federal-provincial partnership in our model, so

Finance committee  I think there's good uptake, but there are always financial constraints. We're always trying to get the maximum number impact over delivering beyond our contract. We also understand that some of the provinces have gone through hard times, and we work with them to find leveraging

Finance committee  Of course nothing can happen without fundamental research. It's a knowledge-based economy. Knowledge is created through fundamental research. Then this research has an impact, and how we make that have an impact on the economy is very important. In the end, we want to have an im

Finance committee  Absolutely.

Finance committee  Is the research support fund the one for university overhead costs?

Finance committee  It is a big issue at our post-secondary institutions. I know that compared to other jurisdictions.... For example, in the United States, the overheads on the grants are much larger and they go to support facilities, which is very important to the labs. Absolutely you need to have

Finance committee  Right now we have around 7,000 internships.