I think it would be very helpful if a clearinghouse was set up, as some businesses like IBM and Oracle and so on are doing in the United States, to share best practices in how you innovate in the service sector. It's just not done here at all.
Schulich School of Business has a little bit of a trend going that way, but I think we should also--I think, Cate, you were referring to this earlier--take a look at our entire tax structure because it's built for a manufacturing or industrial economy. For example, the SR and ED tax credits--or research tax credits, as they're called--don't apply in the service sector. If a Google or a Facebook started here, they would get no tax credits for that kind of innovation, so we're not rewarding the kind of behaviour we need to be rewarding. We're rewarding behaviour for the 15% of the economy that's in manufacturing, but not the 75% that's now in services.
We also--and I think this addresses a point of financing as well--need to take our message around the world in a more imaginative way. Canada is arguably, per capita, the strongest technology country in the world, and very few people know that. The minister, when we met him last week, was very surprised to hear of the Canadian project to put a lander on the planet Mars. We'll be the third country in the world to be able to do that, and almost nobody knows about it because it's private sector driven: who cares? But we need to do that kind of thing.
For example, one of the things we did that brought some interest into Canada--because we're the Advanced Technology Alliance, we should do these things--we started a relay of a webinar that started in Toronto on health care, and we have Richard Alvarez as part of our six-person panel in Toronto. When that strength of Canada and strengths of Canada in health care section was finished, it opened up live for comment in Delhi, India, and then it went live to the Akakan hospital after that.
What we were doing was going around the Commonwealth, bringing up the strengths of the various Commonwealth countries that could partner with Canada, to make this kind of thing accessible to our friends in the United States, who are in a mess. They need our help, and Canada can be that gateway and that linkage, because nobody trades better with the United States than Canada. It could be ideal.