Industry committee  Mr. Chair, it looks as if the IBM person here is going to be the lowest tech person on the panel, but there you go. I'll try to make this succinct so I can get within the timeframe. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, for this opportunity. As you k

Industry committee  Okay, I'd be happy to. We were talking earlier about some history about our company. When I started, even in my time in the company we were the best typewriter manufacturer in the country. Some people would remember the Selectric, but our new employees wonder what that thing is

Industry committee  We've disrupted ourselves so many times forward and yet our employment rate is the highest it's ever been. I'd say that one of the things we need to say, and it was expressed by many of the speakers here, is we have to move to the future and skills are necessary to do that. It's

Industry committee  That's correct.

Industry committee  By the way, to get an engineer in Silicon Valley right now the price is three times that it is in Ontario or the rest of Canada, and the cost of living is four times as high there. We have some competitive advantages here. I think we not only just have to be our Canadian selves—

Industry committee  Yes, but let's take advantage of where we do that. We do it far more in Canada than we do in other countries, frankly, for some of the ratios that were being applied here. I was trying to get it to $100 per employee, Madam Dubé. We're at some $35,000 per employee on our R and D

Industry committee  That's an excellent question, and it actually has a very big application for the public sector to think about. To give you an updated version of that, we are now very heavily invested in oncology in this cognitive computing we call Watson. I was with one of the federal ministers

Industry committee  I have a point of view, of course. Our company was there at the very beginning of Silicon Valley, and I have good friends whom I deal with every day who are in Almaden and other of our labs there as well. But I compete pretty aggressively with them, as a Canadian, to win more mis

Industry committee  We have to have more willingness. The open data question was one.... There are ways of protecting data, and you start with that. Once you do that, open it up. Stop thinking that you have to protect everything. It's almost like the same thing on free trade. You could put blocks o

Industry committee  You're right, especially if you choose a hospital as the start of your question. There are a number of great entrepreneurs who are making interesting...because of the Internet and the cloud services and mobile applications where patients can take their data with them and understa

Industry committee  I'll take a quick shot at that. I think you need an ombudsman in the group. In other words, you need somebody, and with SOSCIP which we talked about earlier, the Ontario government placed the Ontario centres of excellence on the board. We encourage that. There are only two IBMer

Industry committee  One of my insights is I was the chair of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce two years ago and immediate past chair. I really spent time on that question, wondering why Canadians were lagging and all the statistics showed that. My company was one that was sort of an outlier. I do

Industry committee  Sure. In which way do you want to chat about that?

Industry committee  Here's a little-known fact. The best cybersecurity knowledge has been coming from Canada. Q1 Labs in Fredericton, which you may have run into in your time, is now an IBM company, but it runs our cybersecurity around the world, which is, in many circles, known as top-notch. One of

Industry committee  Right. My comment before was to ensure that you have a security understanding and take steps if there are gaps. As the government, there are a lot of great steps forward but there's a lot of knowledge still to be gained. Once you get satisfied that you're working that very, very