Industry committee  It can be a year. With the new funding, it's $30,000 to the company.

Industry committee  Yes, that's just our share. They can top it up if there are market forces or particular areas of expertise. If you're hiring a new graduate, a PhD versus someone recently out of a community college, there may be a difference. We expect them to contribute somewhat to the salary. T

Industry committee  Yes, it's the same program.

Industry committee  When we provide this cost-shared funding for the companies and the funding for the youth, we fund salaries only. We fund the cost to them of the highly skilled people they need, the engineers and the researchers to work in their programs. That means that when we approve money, we

Industry committee  In approving the contribution agreement, and when we approve the amount of funding, the company pays the salary for a certain number of people. When they invoice us, it's for the salary costs of those people. We are counting the number of people they are hiring to do this researc

Industry committee  For the youth program, it can be six months, it can be a year. We find that over 90% of the youth we help stay with the company. It's very high. In many cases, it's one of their earliest employees, so they end up staying with them and growing with the company. We have followed up

Industry committee  There were 10 in the first round.

Industry committee  Yes, MITACS, and especially their youth program, is something that is working very closely with IRAP. We've had them actually visit each of our regions to describe their program and what they're looking for so that we can work closely together.

Industry committee  I'm aware of it, and I think it's a good program. I'm not aware of their funding level, what their aspirations are, and what sort of ask they have. But it is certainly a program that we work with. There is still capacity for placing young people in businesses, and that is certain

Industry committee  Our youth program is fully subscribed very early because what we do is help companies access whatever resources there are, wherever they are. We then put them in contact with other programs, such as MITACS and NSERC, where they can get those resources.

Industry committee  And they travel.

Industry committee  Actually, you are right, it is just postgraduates, recent graduates, who we place within companies. They can also be from colleges. We find that many SMEs find technical staff from colleges as well. We are aware of other programs in the government for placing post-doctorates. Act

Industry committee  I'll comment on that, because we had placed making the linkages between the SMEs and the venture capitalists as a priority for the IRAP program this year. There seemed to be a gap there. What we have to do through IRAP is mitigate the risk for the venture capitalists by further d

Industry committee  When we talk venture capital, we have to also include the angel networks. In Canada the angel networks are becoming increasingly organized and important, and linkages to them and factoring them into the SME world is important.

Government Operations committee  In our case, following the directions in the budget, we have met with both the minister's office and the Deputy Minister of Industry, and we've been sending biweekly reports on how quickly we're moving, two months before we got the money. So we have been getting directions on the