In relation to the question of who owns the software that's being built through government IT contracts, around intellectual property and the use of open-source software, there are some other really interesting examples of different countries doing really interesting things. A couple of examples of this that may be a bit more comparable to the Canadian geographic context are both Germany and France.
The Government of France, maybe a decade ago, declared in legislation that essentially all technology products bought and used by the federal government or by the national government in France needed to be open-source. The term “open-source”, I think, often makes you think of geeks writing code in the basement of a university, but open-source software is widely used by the private sector tech industry, governments, universities and organizations all around the world. It helps get around the situation in which you bought a product from a commercial software vendor that only they provide, and then you're just stuck with them for decades, which often happens with government technology products: We spend millions of dollars on a product from one vendor, and getting away from them is too difficult because they're too entrenched. That's a systemic problem that shows up a lot, so France has legislation that says, “When we're paying companies to build software for us, it needs to be reusable and licensed under an agreement that lets other departments, other parts of the government or even other countries use it.” That's really important.
Germany recently launched what it calls the sovereign technology fund, which is essentially government funding to build digital software products that can be reused across the German government and other governments around the world so that they're not paying for the same software over and over again. There's this idea that, just as bridges, airports and ports create an infrastructure on which the economy functions, government-owned or open-source government-used software creates an infrastructure layer that lets services be delivered more efficiently, at a lower cost and more reliably.
There's a lot of interesting work happening to make software reusable. I think that, for Canada, you could imagine a future government introducing something like a “Don't Pay for the Same Software Twice Act” that enshrines this idea that if we're paying for some company to build a brand new piece of software—