I agree with that.
The other thing—it's hard to do, but I think it's a role governments can play—is to be strategic and put on almost a private sector hat. Do a SWOT analysis. What are our strengths? Where are our weaknesses? What are the opportunities, and what are the threats?
China dominates these markets. There's no sense going there, and the U.S. is here.
Here are some that are really strong. Ontario did this a few years ago. It looked at the technology sector and identified five sectors in which it thought it had particular innovation skills. That's not easy to do, but if you can do that—because you can't do everything—I think that would be one of the challenges.
This risks picking winners and losers, but at some level you probably want to say, what are our core strengths? Is it our educational system? Is it our resource base? We have some unique things that we probably should be looking to build on. If something mind-blowing comes up in other areas, that's fine, but let's really focus.
I'm also a big believer in making an appeal to the private sector by saying, as Céline described, “Here's our objective. This is what we want to achieve. Come to us. Here's a fund of money; we have some money available. We'll guarantee orders for a number of your units. Come to us with what you think is most creative.”
It's competitive—