Yes, it's all of those things.
We know, especially post-COVID and especially since the trade wars, that small and medium-sized enterprises are struggling. They have narrow margins. Most small and medium-sized enterprises in Canada have fewer than five people, so the person who's doing the technology development is also doing payroll and taking out the garbage. They lack the inherent skill, capacity and so on. That's one piece.
It's also the investment, for sure, although sometimes the barriers to entry are not that large. Unfortunately, when we talk about technology, people who love the technology talk about the technology, not about what it's good for. We need more use cases that show simple applications very clearly. For example, you can take a stack of expenses and receipts and turn them into a spreadsheet in five minutes instead of six hours. We need concrete, simple examples. We have them; it's just that they're not widely shared.
We've done research in Quebec as well as across the country, and often, small businesses have a short-term horizon rather than a long-term horizon. For the programs the government has implemented aimed at advancing technology adoption, if they're targeting SMEs, the benefits have to be more than the costs. By this I mean that if you're giving someone a small amount of money to implement technology, you need to make sure they can get it without a lot of trouble. You can still introduce accountability and have audits to make sure they did what they said they were going to do, and you can do evaluations, but if you try to incentivize upskilling, adoption of technology or infrastructure investments, it's important that you make it easy to get access.
The other thing we need to think about, because we're going to spend a lot of money on major projects and infrastructure, is how we can leverage those investments to provide opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises to modernize, upskill, re-skill and so on. I think there are some clever ways we can get more bang for our investment.