I do think, as you said, that even agrifood, which a lot of people don't think is a high-tech area, is very much on the leading edge.
I don't want to make a blanket statement that all Canadian companies don't do this. There are some that do it extraordinarily well. It's just that we don't seem to do it at scale. When you look at the percentage that we're investing on that side, we do lag over time. I won't bore you through some of the charts there, but just on an overall basis, we invest less.
It's particularly true with SMEs, and it's for two reasons. One is that they're not very export-oriented. A lot of our SMEs are domestically oriented. We do find that when we help them become more export-oriented, they actually do invest more, and we've seen some success in some of the programs. However, literally fewer than 2,000 are doing that. I think it's about seeing that you have a much broader market to operate in, and then the Canadian market enables, we think, one to invest more if they see the scale of the opportunity and the market in which they can operate.
The other, which again is mainly on the SME side, is that because of the cost involved in being able to make those investments, if you're not able to have scale—it's again related to exports—there's not a very good incentive to do that. What we're most worried about is the new areas. If you think about health care, which we think is a huge opportunity, regulatory-wise it's a very challenging place to do it. They don't have the legal capabilities or the money to work their way through that.
We think regulation is one area that acts as a barrier that makes it more difficult for people to actually move it forward. If you have to spend your time figuring out whether you're allowed to do it, you just stop.