I'll touch on two.
One is the lack of clear pathways that I touched on earlier, particularly for smaller companies and innovators in the Canadian ecosystem. They basically have two bookends. You can get access to innovation funding with no clear procurement pathway at the end of that, or at least no easy one, through programs like IDEaS or innovative solutions Canada. For big projects, which are generally won by large primes, often foreign, you can be involved in the supply chain, but that's an indirect route. We need something more in the middle—a bridge between early-phase research and a stepping-stone pathway to something larger.
More broadly, there's a big challenge you're going to have with the industrial strategy, writ large. For a whole host of reasons, over time, a system has emerged that tries to minimize risk—technological risk and delivery risk. If we really want to drive innovation and foster more of that, the whole system needs to change its mentality to be less averse to things that are less well tested or clearly defined, because that's how you get innovation at the end of the day.
