It's a very important question to sort out the policy framework to accelerate whatever technology it is. When one wants less expensive technology, it's always the case that technologies have a learning curve. They get cheaper in time. The unfortunate thing is that what most governments are doing around the developed world is that they're accelerating the deployment of what I would unkindly call “yesterday's technologies”. By accelerating subsidies and spending on what you can build today, it means you're not investing in the future. You're not providing incentives for innovation. You're providing more money to those who already know what exists.
To accelerate the learning curve, there's not a pleasant, easy answer to do that. It doesn't work well through the direct subsidies for building yesterday's machines. You have to think about what innovation is and how it works, and this gets to the points that we have heard already in some testimony. What I'll call a “heavy-handed” regulatory approach to instructing jurisdictions on what to build, or accelerating what is being built today, doesn't necessarily take into account how industry really works.
I'm not giving you an easy answer because there is, unfortunately, not an easy answer. We need a framework that stimulates and rewards innovation, to make new and better things. Frequently, the thing that we'll want to use—let's say, profoundly better solar arrays, profoundly better electric vehicles—do not exist today. How do we get those? Well, we want to provide incentives for that kind of risk-taking by both private equity and private capital, because a lot of it's private. We want to avoid the disincentives that stop that from happening, which is the transfer of great technology out of universities in both Canada and the United States into making new companies.
I wish there were an easy answer. In policy circles, which I work in as well, we all like easy answers, sort of like a slogan. But that's it.