Finance committee  Yes, the recommendation here is that we want to support the national expansion and national collaboration of these angel networks. Until now we've been supported at the community level through regional and local programming, but that has created a disparate kind of growth. We have growth in certain urban communities but not in rural communities and not in certain underdeveloped communities, like indigenous and minority communities.

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Chairperson Easter, and to the committee members for inviting us to present today. I think of all the organizations here, we're probably one of the ones that are least used to these opportunities, so we appreciate the opportunity. We're here today because we wanted to bring an opportunity to the government to make a small investment to try to solve what is a critical problem by leveraging the private sector to support economic development through innovation.

Industry committee  I think northern Ontario is a great example. Mary, who is the manager of that group, is one of the members that I like to parade around in terms of everything that she has accomplished. Especially given the complexity of that geography and the economic profile of that geography, I think they've done a fantastic job with the fairly limited support they've received.

Industry committee  In many cases, the investment our community gets from those organizations is actually about building. They give a small amount of capital up front to help leverage these organizations to build, essentially. In the case of Western Economic Diversification, for example, we have a program whereby we identify nascent angel networks.

Industry committee  I think the risk-to-reward equation is the same for anybody who gets involved in this space, but I think what makes it difficult for institutional capital to get into this space as early as the angel investors do is simply the uncertainty. that's related to this. Obviously, institutional capital is usually based on certain formulas and theories that are followed in order to determine how it will be invested.

Industry committee  I think it's less of an issue than it used to be in Canada. Just for clarity's sake, I would say that in Canada, in a typically Canadian fashion, we don't celebrate our successes enough. I think we're actually doing quite well. If you look at the global rankings, you'll see that ours is high—we're up there—and that we have four or five ecosystems that are on the top 20 list of tech ecosystems in the world right now.

Industry committee  We've asked our members about it. We collect a lot of data from our members. One of the points that we actually collect from them is about what government programs out there actually have an impact on the decision to invest. Some programs like IRAP and SR and ED actually have had a leverage effect on our members in terms of encouraging them to take the risk.

Industry committee  I think the community generally is very supportive of those programs. There are some programs that could be more effective. We're currently conducting a bit of a study of our own on which programs are having a great impact with respect to the investor community in terms of attracting investment.

Industry committee  From the data we've been able to collect, we can see that direct investment in areas of manufacturing is about 30% of what our members have invested in over the last six years. In terms of looking at dollars invested, it's about 33% of the total dollars that they've invested. When I talk about “direct”, I talk about companies that either are producing products that they're building here or are directly addressing the manufacturing sector through things such as the Internet of things, advanced manufacturing, and the like.

Industry committee  I think there are institutions that are trying to do that. There are institutions that would like to be more active. I have a great relationship with many of our banks and organizations, such as the BDC, that are trying to address that. It's difficult for big institutions to do that.

Industry committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to present to this committee. I think that because angel investment is something that the government is now becoming more aware of, but that hasn't always been at the top of the list, let's say, I want to give you a bit of an overview about who we are as an organization and who we represent, and then maybe I could talk a bit about the manufacturing sector.