Thank you for the question. It's a mixed bag insofar as the private sector is the wellspring of innovation in the 21st century. It has flipped on its head the innovation model that existed in the 20th century and gave us the Internet, GPS and digital cameras, so the innovation doesn't really need support. It's happening every single day in the private sector.
As previous witnesses have alluded to, the biggest challenge is crossing the valley of death that exists as a result of sclerotic procurement—an exquisitely designed system for the 20th century and completely unfit for task in the 21st. As I alluded to in my testimony, there are the three elements of any ecosystem—competency, capital and customers. Canada has competency in spades. The customer will maybe one day fix itself—we hope so. In the meantime, the thing that bridges that gap is the capital to simply keep the lights on, to allow them to iterate and continue to iterate so that, when the customer is ready, the product is fit for task, reflective of the modern operational environment and just ready to go.
I will die on the hill that capital will solve a lot of these problems.