I'll jump in here and just say that these are all really great initiatives, and cyber is a real problem, but we also need to have a scaled understanding of the challenge and then work from there.
I'm going to one industry report. McAfee, a global player in cyber, has done independent research on this. They see cybercrime as growing from a $600-billion global problem two years ago to a $1-trillion problem this year, and they expect it to accelerate because of COVID and the number of vulnerable populations online.
Just on differentiating between economic development, things like the programs you mentioned in the previous question, and ITBs and procurement, I don't think we should consider procurement as a handout. I don't think anyone I heard during the opening statements was looking for favouritism.
What they are looking for is a level playing field, and I'll just say from a purely economic development perspective, a purchase order of $1 million is much greater in terms of its knock-on effects to the economy than $1 million of economic development programming. It validates the technology and its usability in the field, and frankly, we have to be cognizant that Canada is a very well-respected country globally. We make up about 2% of GDP and roughly the same amount of cybersecurity consumption, so the opportunity of domestic procurement—and the Government of Canada is one of the largest purchasers of cybersecurity tools in this country, along with the banking sector and other sectors—is not only to solve the narrow problem within government. It's to give an incredible launch pad to cybersecurity companies.
Frankly, we shouldn't look at size of company as the only measure of capability. We should get deep into the capabilities they have. Large system integrators, big companies—and I won't name them here—often have the balance sheet and lobbyists to withstand long RFI and RFP processes that are multiple years when they, in fact, don't have the technological capability.
Maybe we need to get a a lot clearer on what we're trying to achieve in procurement and create smaller bite-sized procurement processes we can get through, and then validate technology and start responding to problems the way technology is built and not the way procurement is built.