Maybe as a first competition policy, antitrust is absolutely a strategic lever to embed Canadian companies in global value chains. That's what the Americans use their antitrust policy to do. They grow their companies using competition policy, or not using it, to ensure that their companies are inserted into global value chains. That is absolutely a lever we can use to increase the freedom to operate for Canadian companies, if done strategically.
As you mentioned, IP collectives—the Innovation Asset Collective, which I co-founded, and Mike McLean was here earlier at the committee and spoke on that—need to be funded and expanded. Right now it's just for data-driven clean-tech companies. It needs to be much broader than that.
On the data side, we saw this with Sidewalk Labs. If you read the book that's out on that, I get a brief mention because I helped work with the Waterfront Toronto team on that to reorient the policy. It's about reducing the asymmetry in data and allowing Canadian companies to be able to access Canadian-generated data and to use that as a commercial asset.
There are the privacy concerns that need to be navigated and managed. However, ultimately, if the data is an asset and these big companies are able to use that to far out-commercialize you because they have access to that information, then we need to be able to get to that scale. We can really only mimic that scale, because we're a small open economy, in a collective way—so pooling data assets that Canadian companies can access and commercialize.