I haven't really thought about iPods; BlackBerrys and iPhones, maybe.
Things that let us use new technology to advance our businesses are important. For instance, the report I alluded to--it was either the OECD or the Harvard study, I've forgotten which now--had a discussion of small business connections to the Internet and the use of the Internet.
Canada actually looks pretty bad on that. Our small businesses aren't using the web nearly as much as small businesses in other countries. Perhaps it's because the service is slower, less reliable, more expensive--I don't know. That's the sort of thing that I think actually does add to our cost, reduce our competitiveness, and compromise our standard of living.
On the foreign ownership thing, I think there really is a case to be made that some takeovers are indeed megalomaniac foreign CEOs trying to build empires. But a lot of corporate takeovers.... My research with Andrei Shleifer at Harvard and Robert Vishny at the University of Chicago shows that a lot of corporate takeovers are people buying fixer-upper firms. So you find a bad firm that's badly run and its earnings are low, dividends are low, share prices are low, and you buy it. You fire the old management; you bring in new technology and new management. You fix it up the same way you fix up a house. Then you sell it back to the shareholders at a higher price and you make a profit. And you do it again and again. A lot of takeovers are like that.
If we block takeovers by foreigners, we are going to block the empire-building megalomaniac CEOs--whose corporate empires will probably fall apart anyway as soon as they retire--but we block the fixer-upper takeovers. Those fixer-upper takeovers are important for the quality of governance in an economy.