To go into the troubles of the venture capital industry would take us more than the time allotted here. Suffice to say that what I was trying to get at is that we've made some terrible mistakes with the venture capital industry over the past ten years. We have. We invested in companies at higher valuations than we should have during the late 1990s. We're a young industry; we did not have the management potential to carry them through.
If you take a look at our venture capital industry overall, they have not seen a positive return, so many of the funds that are going out today are having a hard time generating new funds to start off with.
Combined with that, we've now seen the Canadian chartered banks almost completely exit the venture capital asset class. In my very limited discussions with them, a lot of this--as I understand--has to come with the new Basel rules, which state that if you have a high-risk investment--like venture capital asset class--you have a higher rate of reserves that you have to keep on that asset class. I understand the rules, but if our own banks aren't going to be investing in our innovation and putting the money in, we're in big trouble, because there are no larger pockets. Our pension funds aren't there yet either, and we need to create a climate. There needs to be some leadership to create a climate to have these large LPs invest in the venture capital asset class.