Industry committee  Good morning, Chair, members of the committee, and thank you for the opportunity to represent Sustainable Development Technology Canada, or SDTC, an independent, arm's-length foundation founded and funded by the Government of Canada to help commercialize innovative clean technolo

Industry committee  Yes, it's a dynamic that we see across Canada in a variety of technology sectors, although—and I don't have statistics on this that I can quote—certainly anecdotally what we see is that in clean technology the phenomenon is a little less pronounced, for a couple of reasons. One i

Industry committee  Yes, that's a very good question. It's hard to answer that quickly. There's an inherent conservatism, we believe, in Canadian industry in regard to adopting technologies early—to avoid taking the risk. That's number one. Number two—and this is being addressed by the new govern

Industry committee  Certainly, and thanks for the question. To clarify, this view comes from our portfolio companies, the SMEs that are trying to commercialize these technologies. Of course, we work very collaboratively with universities—they are members of our consortia—and we encourage that going

Industry committee  Yes, it's fraught with a number of issues. The principal issue is really just a matter of the risk/reward at that stage from an investment perspective and also from a customer adoption perspective. Taking the customer's perspective for a moment, the risks from deploying a tech

Industry committee  Absolutely. I have a couple of thoughts on that point. First, on that adoption and piloting type of scenario, I think there are ways that.... If you set up things like the CANMET lab, for example, in Alberta, which is specifically for oil sands-related technologies, it's built;

Industry committee  Thank you for the question. It varies. We deal with companies, as you are aware, or projects that are in the development and demonstration phases—so completing the development and then doing a demonstration project. Depending on where in that spectrum they fall, the answer will

Industry committee  What I would say is that the more buttoned-down it is, and the clearer we can see that they have a freedom to operate and a market that they can attack, the more likely it is we are going to fund them, number one, and the more likely it is we'll be able to fund them in a greater

Industry committee  Absolutely, far and away; it's considered the gold standard.

Industry committee  There is huge growth in Asia in everything, so absolutely there's a massive market for clean technology. I think it was in 2010 that China surpassed the U.S. as the number one region for investment into clean technology. They are the global leaders. They are aggressive. If you lo

Industry committee  That's a great question.

Industry committee  There are a variety of things, some of which we've touched on. The one that we haven't touched on is supporting the venture industry. To the extent that there are Canadian-based venture firms that can support Canadian companies, which they typically do because they're close to ho

Industry committee  In our program we fund a project consortium in each case. The government money, which is the money we provide into that project consortium, is on average across our portfolio 33%. It's capped at 33%; in practice, it's actually about 29%. It's about a two and a half to one leverag

Industry committee  I believe that was Ms. Peters who mentioned that.

Industry committee  I don't have specific statistics I can quote to you at this time. We do track companies that are ultimately exited down the road. Typically that's well downstream from us. We invest at a fairly early stage, pre-commercial. Most of the companies that would be acquired would be acq