Thank you for the question.
I think if you look at the Canadian ecosystem from an information technology lens, if you use that lens to look at it, there is no shortage of innovators or entrepreneurs starting in business. Where we get into some issues as a Canadian sector is that we are unable to build companies of scale and size, partly because we're still a growing nation. We don't have the necessary infrastructure support and everything in place to help companies grow in scale.
Our market is very small. For any technology company to be of capacity and survive, it must have a global footprint. There is no such thing as “just a Canadian market” once you start to do that. We have always been tied to the north-south trade, which is the U.S., and it's a big market. But as the winds of trade change and east-west becomes more important, and the rate of growth is much more sharp in some of the emerging economies, it is necessary that we provide our companies with the tools and infrastructure to grow and enter those emerging markets.
On what is needed, we need to have the skill set, the talent, that can build the companies and grow companies of scale. It needs the funding, so it needs the capital market available to them as and when they need to grow, from working capital and everything else. Finally, it needs the access to the right market.
We need to use all of the tools that the government and others can marshal to help this company to the actual market. At the end of the day, the question you posed really comes under the three, what I call blood vessels that make a company successful: access to capital, access to market, and access to talent. For the first part, I think we need to address them from those perspectives.
I think more could be done. We have appeared at multiple committees in terms of IP regime in Canada, innovation culture in Canada. I think a lot needs to be done.