Finance committee  Thank you for the question. In today's environment it should not be that difficult because the satellite transmission and the wireless side has come down, particularly if you start looking at the next generation 5G network. Today, most networks in Canada can only transfer 400 megabytes at high speed.

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. There are several measures to encourage the use of technology, such as the 2006 telecommunications policy review panel. They particularly identified ICT adoption with a lot of the tax credits that are tied to the CCA rate, and the conclusion was that it would directly help the adoption of technology, particularly among the small and medium-sized businesses.

Finance committee  Okay, thank you. Canada's IP regime is not comparable with that of the other OECD nations. We need to create an IP regime that is consistent with others. I think the government should think about lower tax rates for revenue generated from intellectual property, relative to any other revenue.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning to everyone in Ottawa. My name is Karna Gupta. I'm the president and CEO of ITAC, the Information Technology Association of Canada. We represent the ICT sector in the country, which has about $160 billion in annual revenue. We invest about $4.8 billion annually in private sector R and D, which is more than any other sector in the industry.

Industry committee  It's a very good question. A lot of work is actually going on in this area. I was fortunate enough to come across, as part of the millennium goals, a program called Millennium@EDU. If you look into that, you'll find even within the developed countries like Spain and Portugal, they have immensely developed by having a national strategy around deploying Millennium@EDU.

Industry committee  On rural and remote, I think it does need a national investment strategy. I think if you look at most of our large infrastructure carriers in the country, whether it be cable, satellite, or telephony, these companies do spend several billions of dollars a year to upgrade their technology and they continue to do so.

Industry committee  Intellectual property is the most valuable asset the company would have. We need to have an IP regime that is not only on par with the global scale but in fact better. You can look at any small Canadian company, and I'll use myself as an example. I used to be CEO of Certicom. I had 500 intellectual properties filed globally.

Industry committee  I'll give you two specific examples. One is that I think our intellectual property regime needs to be a lot more nimble and faster for the Canadian companies to process. Second, one of the comments we put forward in our budget submission was that if I was a small business and I generated $2 of revenue—$1 from regular business and $1 from selling intellectual property—that revenue should be taxed at a lower rate to create incentives for our companies to promote and commercialize the intellectual property they have, not only locally but globally.

Industry committee  I think first we need to understand what the situation is today in the Canadian market. In the Canadian market, most of the time you see that small and medium-sized businesses are not using online tools as much as they should in order to grow. That is a statement of fact. If you go look at eBay or others, from their statistical point of view, they will say they're not using it.

Industry committee  It will be a living document. You'll see the first one probably within the next couple of weeks. It will be mostly around a call to action on what the issues are and what needs to happen. Then we'll probably convene some of the experts to put together some of the major issues we need to address.

Industry committee  Thank you for the question. I'll kick it off this way. I think it really needs to start at a very early stage at the school level. I recognize the difference in terms of the provincial versus federal jurisdiction issue on education. But that aside, I think a national strategy is needed in terms of making sure our kids are exposed to the right programs at an early stage so their learning capacities are for what's needed for tomorrow and so they are not faced with choices in grade 8 or 9 such that when they come out on the other end their options are working either at Walmart or at Tim Hortons.

Industry committee  I think the rural and remote broadband would be important to drive the innovation culture. In a technology sector, people don't go to jobs; jobs go to people. We need to get to the people where they are. In a Canadian context, where most of our population is urban, around the cities and down the 49th parallel, I think the core population does have the broadband structure.

Industry committee  Yes. I think one of the things we're finding in our sector is that the industry is getting more involved with academia to design what's needed. We are involved in a process of developing a national occupational survey as to what type of skill set young people should have going into the workforce.

Industry committee  Thank you for the question. I think if you look at the Canadian ecosystem from an information technology lens, if you use that lens to look at it, there is no shortage of innovators or entrepreneurs starting in business. Where we get into some issues as a Canadian sector is that we are unable to build companies of scale and size, partly because we're still a growing nation.

Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and honourable members. Thank you very much for having ITAC at this session. Just to introduce ourselves, ITAC represents the technology sector of the country. With over 300 companies, we produce about $160 billion in revenue and one million jobs. Most importantly, we spend about $5 billion on R and D, so the disruptive technology discussion is very apropos.