Thanks for the question. I'm glad to come back to this topic.
I have just a couple of things to bring forward. The first is that we're great at creating companies in Canada. We're a prolific creator of small companies. In fact, when I was a venture capitalist in the late nineties, some research I did showed that in the greater Toronto area there were more tech start-ups than in Boston and Austin, Texas, combined, and they are two very large tech hubs in the States, outside of California. So that's not the problem in Canada.
The problem is twofold. The first is killing off the underperformers. That's just part of the life cycle. Some companies should not proceed. They should just shut down early because they don't have a winning technology in the global marketplace.
The second thing is that we don't put enough money behind our winners. This is part of the issue in terms of companies getting bought too early. It's that we don't fund them to the point of a sufficient value threshold where they can attract a significant offer that is going to really deliver benefits to the shareholders and to the economy in Canada, or for them to be able to go it alone for an extended period of time—to be public, to be independent.
So there are a couple of things to consider in terms of that issue.
I agree that M and A by foreign or Canadian buyers is a good thing. It's absolutely necessary. But M and A too early is not a healthy thing.