Let me start off with a brief example that you will all know well. The current war that you see between the cable companies and the telephone companies is because cable is capable of putting telephones over cable systems. You are all aware of that. The technology that allows them to do that was created by a company in Vancouver about eight or nine years ago, and it was sold to the company that has 90% of the desktop boxes. In other words, all cable companies use this chip, from a company called Broadcom in the United States. It's that Canadian technology that allows all the cable companies in North America to compete.
When we started, there were six employees. There are currently more than 200 employees working for that company. Today it is one of the centres of excellence for Broadcom in the development of the technologies they use to allow what is called Voice over Internet Protocol.
That would be one company as an example. The money we earned—that the government earned—on capital gains taxes from that one investment was more than the entire amount of money that was put into the program in British Columbia up to that time. So it is a big win for everyone, the employees as well as the government, in terms of rates of return.
Your second question was on appetite. Really, you are right in saying that the appetite of Canadians has been a bit depressed over the last number of years. Part of the reason for that is due to the change in the way investment advisers get paid. Ten years ago, investment advisers were paid equally whether they put in a small ticket or a large ticket. As you can see from our brief, what has happened is that large, bank-owned institutions in the investment advisory area are trying to get people to move away from small transactions. They are discounting the amount the investment adviser will be paid, and therefore the investment adviser looks toward other investments.
One of the things we're suggesting is that we need to reinvigorate the interest of investment advisers, because financially they are penalized within their organizations for selling this product. We need a bit of a kick-start for individuals, and that's why we're recommending that you match what the provinces have done and take it up to about a 40% credit. Then, as historically we have seen with the federal government before, as the funds start to come in and you see people reinvigorated, you can start to reduce the credit from 40% to maybe 35%.