I will focus my comments more specifically to Canada because I'm a Canadian practitioner.
We certainly have a very unique system in Canada and historically, a very robust market for capitalizing small businesses. What's different here, and certainly in the U.S. from where I have more direct experience, is that we tend to finance companies publicly earlier than they would in the U.S. For the last 20 years, it's been very robust with ups and downs with the cycles.
In the last four or five years, it's been a prolonged down cycle and we haven't seen it bounce back up.
I look at the U.S. and it's been more robust on their private equity side which is the comparison. I look to Canada and say there just needs to be a bit of the priming of the pump to kick-start the animal spirits and get people back in investing in the earlier stage companies.