Most of our members who are in e-commerce to the point of what Samer was just describing find it's just a tough market to get into and actually succeed in. And I don't want to echo what everybody has said here for the past hour and a half, but for all these reasons combined, people tend to stay away from it. It's just way too risky to get into a business if you want to go on and excel.
The United States right now are breaking down the barriers. They're breaking down regulations to get ahead so their companies can compete. And as a foreign direct investment senior person in our organization travelling around the world, especially in the United States, I've seen more mergers and acquisitions than I can count these days than greenfield investments and just good investments happening in Canada.
What's ending up happening is that these companies are coming up, seeing the gap there, and taking advantage of it, and they're coming up and buying up our companies. It is a major issue that we're going to continue to have. And frankly, it's not just in this sector; it's all the way across the board. I can name a few recently, but there are a lot of companies up for sale right now. Our companies will shy away from the e-commerce business for all these reasons and try to get into something else.
There was a comment about what we can do. I think the federal government is starting to get a better handle on what needs to happen. There is a program right now that we take advantage of for STEM and all these great things that we do, as people who bring together academia, industry, etc.--for example, FedDev, or Ontario's SODP program. Depending on who you talk to, you call it one of the two programs, but there are great programs there for companies, including STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—which people can take advantage of.
It's guys like us, at a regional level and an economic development agency level, where the rubber hits the road with companies. We have the pulse of them, and we understand what's going on. A program like that is brilliant because it brings the federal government, from the top right down to the grassroots, to start working across the board in all the different areas.
So kudos to the federal government. We have miles to go. The United States is figuring out quickly how to capitalize on that, but if we don't get our act together on e-commerce and across technology, they're going to keep coming up here and gladly taking over our companies.