In some places, yes, it is; in many places, no, it's not.
It's not that the regulators aren't capable of doing the technical assessment. In many cases, it's that the legal authorities for them to be able to make a judgment are delayed. They're in the pipeline; they're just not fully articulated. There's a gap in the regulatory system, and you can't point to any one thing and say, “If you could just fix that one thing, the system would work”. What you're hearing from companies is that they have a vague idea that the system is improving, but there are some gaps there, and that's a hard sell when you go to the private capital markets to raise funds for the commercialization process, which is where a lot of the costs will be.
You asked how we can accelerate innovation. Let's look at the federal side. You spend a lot of money, but you don't always spend it very well. You spend it in short bursts, and you often end up putting it in interesting places, but it doesn't necessarily go to the high-impact places. I think if you had some discussion with the Genome Canada world, which is working with Agriculture and Agri-Food and the environmental file, you'd find that they've put virtually nothing in the last five years into any major crop area: there was nothing in pulses, nothing in canola. Canola's wrapped up. There was nothing in wheat and virtually nothing in the livestock area. You have a lot of good science, but it's not connected to the needs of the industry today.
Then there is the IP question. The federal government owns a lot of intellectual property. Don't kid yourself: you may be a public-good institution, but you have a lot of private intellectual property, and it's hard to get it leveraged out in some cases. Federal policies are sometimes more stringent than those in the private sector, so it's extremely expensive to license or commercialize technology. That's an area that I know Industry Canada, Agrculture Canada, and all the other agencies that do research have been concerned about. It's one that we talk about and study, but we revert to the stovepipe that each individual entity owns its intellectual property.
I've heard from private companies that in some cases it's easier for them to go as an agent of two public institutions to do the licensing of technology between two public institutions, meaning that NRC and Ag Canada sometimes can't get the technology between them, even though it's held in the name of the Queen, yet a large multinational can do it. You have a bunch of these things generating frictions that slow down commercialization and value generation.