I think you need both. The expertise is a needed piece, but I think you need to pair it with the kind of agency that would look at this and feed into any kinds of decisions.
It has to be pulled out and dealt with as its own being, and you need to have expert analysis for all of these crosscutting files. I've mentioned many of them before. The intangibles economy works on legal frameworks, and it's a hands-on economy as opposed to a neo-liberal, hands-off, tangible production economy, so it's a completely different tool kit. I think we have to build the capacity broadly, narrowly and specifically, and we have to create the kind of legislative and agency powers to deal with this.
Yes, if you build this capacity so that wherever this resides in the government, it has to reference it, that's a step forward. If you expand the scope of this to deal with the broader kinds of places that I've mentioned, including having the reverse ability of partnerships, that's great, too, but I've seen so many things like ISED's financing Huawei through granting agencies. People adored Sidewalk Toronto. They let the Tesla battery technology go. Money goes to Invest in Canada to say, “Come take our best stuff,” so this whole system makes me very, very nervous. We have to break with the past.
Whether it's within ISED or outside of ISED, that's an important question, but I've seen the quality of Bill C-27, and it's so foundationally flawed that it doesn't give me confidence.