This is a great question, and I thank you for it.
This starts back when we were seeing the transition in the economy of southern Ontario. We decided to look at programs that would provide for better jobs and better job opportunities and really grow and diversify the economies of smaller communities in particular. We knew from our consultations and our round tables that venture capital was a serious impediment to this type of growth. That really was the genesis of this program.
This particular program was announced with the other ones, all within about four to six weeks back in the fall of 2010, again, as an initiative to show the change in FedDev's focus and that in fact we had a suite of programs that would pretty much fill most of the needs of any entrepreneur.
To date we have had about 172 applications approved under the IBI program for some $102 million, but the leveraging goes way beyond that. In fact, last night I got a note that on Dragons' Den was one of the companies from Kanata that had received a very small amount of repayable money through this program. They actually got selected by all of the dragons; they turned them down, but took one of their offers.
I have to say that all the programs working together make up that ecosystem and support the entire system, which is a collection of parts. Venture capital is one of those parts. Skilled workers make up another one of those parts. We know that there are folks in southern Ontario who have great ideas but they can't get them to the market, so we have programs that will help move a product or a process down the development line to the marketplace much sooner.
But we also know that Canada's start-ups are very strong. We are one of the leading countries in the world with start-up capacity. Again, you add those factors together and it doesn't take too long to come up with a venture capital angel investor. I don't want to speak about the national history of venture capital, but it isn't that strong and it's certainly not that old. So we are now seeing under this program not just local investors, as investors now are being attracted from around the world, and his really is what the purpose of the program is.
We won't be there forever, but this initial start and the introduction of our capacity to the United States and other investors are the results that we want to see, so we are very pleased currently, and I am pleased that the outcome will be longer lasting.