That's a big question. Thank you very much for it.
When you think of our natural tendency as a culture in Canada, we are risk averse. We covet our banking system, which is very risk averse in a lot of ways. The terms in the system for providing loans to small business entrepreneurs to get them the funding and to get from the research to.... We fund the research well, but it's when they actually need the money to pay salaries and to scale that we don't have a lot of early-stage investment into some of our deepest technology companies, whether it's from private individuals or enough venture capital to sustain the amount of research that we need to globally compete on an annual basis. It's not equal.
Personal guarantees by entrepreneurs are expected. They have to put up their homes and their personal situation to actually get their businesses started. It's issues like these that I think are at the really early stage and are part of the commercialization challenges we have.
Then it starts to compound. What we have seen is that, with the restrictions we put on the early stage of companies, by the time they get to.... We have a momentum program that helps companies do $100 million in revenue. By the time they get to that stage, they've already predetermined that the company will leave Canada and the economic benefits will be accrued to other jurisdictions. We have to fix the early stage. That requires regulations. It requires loan guarantees. It requires the removal of loan guarantees and other things at the early stage, so we don't compound the issue.
Our challenge in Canada is that we don't have any foreign multinational in the high-growth industries of technology and life sciences to be the acquirer of IP. If you look at where IP ends up, over 60% of commercially viable IP ends up in the hands of these global multinationals.
When we don't protect what I call that messy middle—that wealth generation piece that nobody in Canada likes to talk about—and when we don't solve for those true business problems, we are just setting up the situation where they will end up doing the best thing for the commercialization of their technology.