Yes, thank you.
I wish for Canada to be in a world where it's as easy as just manufacturing and having the jobs, but that's not the world we exist in today. It's about intangible assets. It's about owning technology and commercializing technology and data. Simply having production happen here and subsidizing it are not going to be high-performing. Everybody can do that.
We need to be the ones who own the technology and commercialize it. Despite wanting to be the best, it's like spending a whole bunch of money on new running shoes saying you're going to be a marathon runner and never leaving the couch. We are not in this race. There are no Canadian firms.
The more you put in here and the more money you put into foreign firms, the worse it is for the companies that Andrew is talking about. Canadian firms are here paying taxes and trying to grow in scale, and you're putting the thumb on the scale of our biggest and fiercest competitors. It's the opposite of what you want to be doing.
Smart countries don't provide adoption subsidies for technologies they don't own. That's what we're doing. That's the problem. You have to put your socks on your feet before you put on your shoes. At this point, we're putting our socks over the top of our shoes. We're doing it backwards.
We need to create an industry and have industrial capacity, and then drive adoption and further expand growth. We're doing the opposite. We're making the walls higher for our competitors to lock us into this low value-add position. It's not something I want, but this is the reality.
I work with innovative Canadian firms, and trying to do a deal on IP terms to be able to extract and increase value with an OEM is extremely difficult and almost impossible. It's like living in a magical world that doesn't exist where you can just have a big manufacturer across the street and then you get a deal because you're a small Canadian company right across from it.
The only way you get that deal is if you have a strong IP position and you leverage in, and then you insert into the value chain and expand across it. Just putting a bunch of jobs in a bunch of factory positions down here in southwest Ontario.... I go to Windsor all the time. My background is in heavy truck parts manufacturing. I understand the realities of this, and the realities have shifted.
It's about IP, and it's about data, and that's not the game the public funders are playing.