Obviously I'm a big fan of that. I think we need to take some real national risks. We basically dance around looking for a perfectly guaranteed solution, and we're not going to find one. This is a very fast-moving area.
Just to use Taiwan as an example, they decided about 15 years ago that the government would put emphasis basically on the guts of technology. So if you pick up almost any device you have--computer, cellphone, and all these kinds of things--you'll discover all sorts of what are called Taiwanese insides. They make all sorts of semiconductors and processors and all these different kinds of bits. Probably the only Taiwanese company you've heard of is Acer, which does actually produce the whole thing. But many of the things you'll buy, such as something that has “Toshiba” on it, will in fact, a lot of the time, have Taiwanese product inside.
They just made a shift within the last year and a half to basically say that digital content is the next wave, which is why you're seeing digital arts centres. They're putting all sorts of money into new institutes. They're basically designed to train designers, artists, creative personnel, and people of that sort. But here is the trick with Taiwan. They look across a very narrow strait and see more than a billion and a half people who speak Chinese, and their digital content is not aimed at Canada. They basically have an opportunity to use this remarkable access they now have to China, which they didn't have ten years ago.
What's also interesting about their particular model, and it's really hard to sort of imagine this working quite so well in Canada, is that they actually take people back and forth between the universities, the government, and the private sector. If you go in to talk to a government agency, half the people there used to be in universities and half used to be in industry. What really stands out about Taiwan is their commitment to loyalty. They basically are telling the Taiwanese that they have to come back home, that they have to work to make the Taiwanese economy strong, and that they're going to invest in people.
They've actually come over to people in North America, more in the United States than in Canada, and have said, “Pick up your company and bring it here. We'll give you a factory and we'll give you three years with no income tax.”