These suggestions are all low-hanging fruit. All of them are low-hanging fruit.
The first one is that we can connect Corporations Canada with the start-up community in order to make sure every entrepreneur knows about all of the resources that exist in the Government of Canada. We can go to the provinces and municipalities, but there are so many resources and supports they don't know about. We just need to plug it together and we can get it done. That's number one.
Number two is that we need to work together to create a tax environment for entrepreneurial success. This is a bit harder, but I believe that some of the announcements this week are moving in the right direction of lowering the tax rate for small businesses and so on, but that's nothing we can do together. Let's get the taxes right. I'll leave that to you; you're the experts.
The third thing that I think we can work together on is also low-hanging fruit. It's the brand Canada. I have a charity in the U.K. that works with young entrepreneurs and is fully government funded. The U.K. government—UKTI, which is their trade and investment group—created a campaign called “Britain is Great”. No matter what airport you went into at the time, even though their economy was hit so hard by the last recession, you saw Richard Branson there and “Britain is Great”. The amount of pride you would have as a British citizen would be incredible.
Canada can do the same thing. We have great entrepreneurs here, and there's no reason we can't create a campaign. If we just improved the user interface, and we created a big campaign.... I have no marketing budget, and we're huge on social media. The world's looking at Startup Canada. There's nothing we can't do with those two things, and then you can get the taxes right. That would be really helpful.
