We've used the SR and ED program for many, many years. As a small company, we're somewhat unusual because we started our company doing a lot of work in defence and space research. We developed expertise in navigating government forms and applications fairly early in the company's existence, but we can certainly appreciate from many small businesses that those processes might be considered quite daunting.
From our perspective, the thing that we appreciate about the SR and ED tax incentive program is that it does not try to pick a winner in terms of a research area. It allows small companies to decide for themselves, on their own business cases, what sort of research makes sense. From our standpoint, we think that's a very important feature of that program. It is very difficult to predict what is going to be the next disruptive technology. It is disruptive because people aren't expecting it to happen. When government tries to pick winners by focusing funding into very specific technology selections, there's a possibility that you end up undermining a small company that might be on the verge of some remarkable breakthrough. We think the SR and ED tax incentive program is very good in that it allows us to decide what sort of research we think our company should pursue.
One of the things that's been rolled back over the last couple of years in SR and ED is coverage over things like capital expenditures. There are, as far as we can tell, almost no grant programs from the Canadian government that support capital expenditures associated with research. We think that's an oversight. A lot of research is very capital-equipment-intensive. It requires investment by small businesses in sometimes expensive new technologies, and having no support for capital expenditures does make it difficult for companies to compete in the high-tech sector.