Mr. Chair, that is a great question.
You are absolutely right. Defence Research and Development Canada is a research, not a commercialization organization.
New technologies and inventions are commercialized through Canadian and sometimes foreign private industry. We are transferring technologies to those companies to enable them to provide equipment to the Canadian Armed Forces and to the Department of National Defence.
In health care, we are currently working on developing vaccines and antidotes for chemical and bacteriological agents. As you know, there are serious concerns that those types of weapons might exist in Syria, for instance. These are complex challenges and it is not easy to find solutions.
Canada is one of the leaders, if not the leader, in shaping the Medical Countermeasures Initiative, which has prompted four countries to work together. We have called upon the Surgeon General of the United States, the health care services of the various armed forces in the four countries and the public health care services to work together on identifying and creating antidotes and vaccines to protect our Canadian Armed Forces against viruses or toxins used as chemical weapons abroad.
Clearly, those same viruses can also spread to civilians, so we are working with public health organizations to collectively develop those antidotes and vaccines. We do not commercialize the vaccines.