I quite disagreed with the Canada innovation corporation, absent the precondition that I talked about, because we keep thinking it's Ken Arrow economics from the 1950s, as if it's an incentive structure where you have to tweak a granting council, share a risk or change a tax factor. In fact, the difference between us and a $1-trillion participation in these things is not a tweak here or a tweak there from the incentives.
If you look at the notes that I gave you as a committee, I gave a small example of the dozen elements of strategic frameworks the U.S. has deployed in these negative rights structures just this year. They really have nothing to do with grants, innovation corporations or the changing of taxes. It's about the legal frameworks to ex ante capture structures in a way that makes them richer and more powerful. That form of thinking has been absent in our policy architecture from the day the economy started changing to this intangibles economy, to a degree, about 35 years ago.
I'm not saying spend more, and I'm not saying spend less. Let's get more out of the money we spend, understanding the nature of the legal frameworks so we can enclose and capture them and can charge a rent for them. That's why I say people are not going to build a house on land they don't have ownership of or a right to. People say if we just give more money, start a new investment corporation or change a tax act, then it makes sense. No. If the government subsidizes half the money, it's only half-senseless, but it still hasn't addressed the precondition.
Where do we capture the benefit of our $7.5 billion a year in research funding? You will find there is no institutional apparatus, no capacity and no orientation to that, and there's a direct link between that failure and our inability to grow in this innovation-productivity realm, whether it's in new industries like biotech or traditional ones like value-added energy or farming.