I'd be willing to volunteer an answer to that, because I think those are valuable questions. For policy-makers, those are the most difficult questions to answer.
The only advice I could give on this specifically is that as legislators, you cannot try to legislate this through a rear-view mirror. Because it's changing so quickly, you can't, as you're driving down this change highway, look in the rear-view mirror to see what you just went through and say, “Oh, let's regulate that”. The difficulty is that it's always hard to predict what will be happening next. And at the speed at which governments work generally, in terms of adopting laws and having debate in a free and democratic society, it takes time. That time can be a problem, and it can be an impediment to innovation.
So I think a general rule is to not create more hurdles than needed and to try to maintain that balance where we can make sure that we generate the environment for people to innovate and create wealth, while protecting consumers and Canadians' privacy. When you set up too many roadblocks to try to protect too many things, I think that's when we really risk falling behind.
Currently we're not falling behind. There are places where we're ahead, and places where we may be second. We're not a country that's falling behind by any means, but we have to make sure that we don't put up roadblocks to put ourselves in a situation where we are falling behind.
Demographics also play a major role in everything in terms of public policy. The fact that we have an aging demographic will show--and we'll see it for a while yet, not only in health care but also in other sectors--that we may be slower to adopt new technologies just because we're an older population. But when you look at our younger population, how quickly they adopt technology, you see that they're adopting it as fast or faster than anyone around world. When we look at Canada as a whole, we have to be careful that we don't lump everybody in. There are segments of the Canadian population that are adopting technology as fast or faster than anyone else in the world.