Absolutely. Thank you very much for the question.
Before I answer the question, I would like to make a quick correction. I think I missed an important word in my presentation. When I was mentioning the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and the estimated businesses that are at risk of closing, I may have said 239, and it's 239,000. Thank you for letting me correct that. It changes the dynamic quite drastically.
To answer your question, Startup Canada is a national convenor organization. We are not a competitor. We work with accelerators. We work with incubators. We work with other support organizations in the ecosystem. We constantly receive feedback from entrepreneurs from coast to coast to coast regarding where their biggest pain points are.
Something that we hold very dear to our hearts is that we provide entrepreneurs with a solid foundation to ensure they're equipped and ready to start businesses. This, to me, is an important aspect of what the government is trying to communicate in recognizing the importance of entrepreneurs playing a critical role in job creation and job growth. We create the entrepreneurs who are going to be creating the companies for tomorrow, as well as job creation.
Because we work with every single entrepreneur regardless of where they are in their entrepreneurship journey, we have programs that are created in response to their needs.
When I say that we're the only national organization that's capable of supporting.... We are already doing all of this. We're looking to the government. We're coming to the government, saying, “Look we're a trusted voice. Entrepreneurs come to us. They trust us. They know that we're able to support them regardless of where they are in their journey.”
We would love to be able to partner formally with the government to amplify our impact and deliver on being able to provide the end-users, that being entrepreneurs, with the tools, resources and services that the government seems to be very keen on wanting to do to support job creation and job growth.