One of the funds is about $540 million. In two years, about $40 million has been disbursed. One of the biggest overarching challenges from a Canadian economic sustainability perspective is that those announcements are made and companies get excited. They go to their prospective customers and say that there are going to be opportunities here; let's line up some projects; let's get some matching funds. Then time continues to go by and confidence is lost from potential buyers of our Canadian technology exports.
There are so many different ways we can try to solve that problem. Right now it seems as though a few people are holding the decision-making card on when and how those funds are going to be disbursed.
We know that some mechanisms to use include the B.C. model, like what happened with the $100 million B.C. clean tech, or B.C. tech money. Once the application is made, knowing when the decision will come is definitely one piece. From there, knowing how long it will take to actually get the funds disbursed and under what terms....
I think this can happen quite easily. There are a lot of organizations like us. We're supporting hundreds of these. There are 850 clean-tech companies—way more now because everything is clean tech.
We're trying to connect with as many levels of government as we can to understand how we can help facilitate the process. Our goal is to not have tax funding going straight to the companies. It's that they will work on the matching piece so that we know it's a viable business opportunity.
It's becoming quite detrimental. Canadians are also moving outside of the country. They're taking their companies to other regions—Australia, the U.K. and obviously the U.S. as well.