But, sir, money needs to flow very quickly, and that's the reason for our idea of using patents as collateral, or of looking at BDC's feasibility template that we've developed together. There needs to be an immediacy, a sense of tremendous urgency. Last week in Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge alone 600 people lost their jobs, and this is recurring every hour of every day as we speak.
So you need to have the budget passed, of course, as Gerry pointed out. And we need to have something simple to monitor; we need to have a program that is not cumbersome, for which is easy to look at performance metrics. And you must create this patient capital to protect Canadian innovation.
In Mississauga, a company with 400 people has decided, because it's a foreign-owned company, to close powder metal plant. That company uses home-grown Canadian technology to create gears out of our metallurgy, for example. They gave the world the first ever cost-saving gear, saving General Motors $82 billion in one year, in transmission technology.
So the point is that you cannot afford this. If any technology is leaving Canadian shores, you must step up quickly on a case-by-case basis and get BDC involved—if it's viable—and get the competitors among the APMA membership in Canada to carry on with that technology.
So using patents, using the viability report, and giving patient capital of maybe $1 million for every $10 million in sales, and getting this redeployment of assets created are three immediate priorities. They are easy to monitor, simple to implement, and there's not too much money involved, at the same time.
So we really request that you understand this. I'm from the trenches and have no prepared speech here. We honestly are struggling every single day in this country.