That is the billion-dollar question facing us all today.
First of all, we can at least recognize the fact that data is a very valuable asset, but has no specific monetary value at the same time. You can't necessarily put a figure on this. We see it indirectly in the market cap of companies that have very limited amounts of physical assets but a very large market cap, and they don't even have intangible assets in the form of intellectual property, patents and so forth, which account for most of it. We know there's an awful lot of value out there.
We also see in market transactions an acquisition that will be described as a pure data play. A company that may not be making very much money whatsoever may transact for billions of dollars, simply because of the data it has. How do you deal with that?
I think the first thing to recognize is that companies disclose that they have data, and then we apply a threshold to the amount of data—perhaps to the value of it—and a description of the data as to whether or not it would have potential national security concerns and how that data connects with other forms of data that we may have in the Canadian ecosystem.
It's a question of getting new terminology about the connectedness of companies. There has been work done on that, by the way, by Ari Van Assche in Montreal. He has put together charts that show how companies connect, but we're at the very early stages of understanding this.
In the first instance, what I would suggest is that we have a separate criterion for data, where it is disclosed and described. There would be a consideration as to whether or not that amount of data is something that is material and of concern to Canada.