Government Operations committee  Thank you very much. Good afternoon. I did prepare so that I could be succinct and to the point. By the way, this is the second time I am a witness—not at this particular committee, but I did a witnessing in 2011 as well. Maybe you'll get a bit of progress in 2017. My name is

Government Operations committee  —or PeopleSoft, or any of those large companies, despite their deployments not working. Once Entrust acquired my business.... Entrust was a secure messaging company that used our content analysis to see what was in an email before deciding to encrypt it and send it off. By the wa

Government Operations committee  I was going to ask, “Now what do you do with it?”

Government Operations committee  Can you test it?

Government Operations committee  Do you mean in terms of bringing innovation to the government?

Government Operations committee  Certainly it is from my experience. Don't forget that Entrust was a publicly traded corporation, and I went in there as a vice president, so I got to see us selling to major institutions such as Citibank, Capital One, the U.S. government, the Canadian government, etc. I would sa

Government Operations committee  Honestly, take some of the money you give to BDC and give it to BCIP. BDC is not an equal, gender-diverse bank. Those would be my two cents. Michael...the president of BDC will probably be mad at me for saying that, but....

Government Operations committee  Even if you take me as an example company, BCIP in 2011 gave us our first substantial sale. Then the U.S. government looked at what I did in Canada, so now I have U.S. government customers because of the BCIP program. Then when I closed, the second BCIP was with CBSA. I now have

Government Operations committee  Even if we had raised venture capital, maybe we would have gone under without a sale. I don't know.

Government Operations committee  Yes.

Government Operations committee  I know we don't always like to praise them, especially these days, but one of the amazing programs the United States has had for a long time is the set-aside program. The set-aside program is really interesting in that there are companies that are designated as 8(a) programs, whi

Government Operations committee  —the rest of you guys would not qualify.

Government Operations committee  Anyway, if you're a minority-led business or a woman, then if IBM wins a major contract, or Lockheed Martin, or General Dynamics, or even any of the ones I was working with at Entrust—

Government Operations committee  No, wait; I'm going somewhere with this. I'm sorry. Essentially, the set-aside is 20% for the federal government of the U.S. What the corporates have—we call them “corporates” in We Connect International now—Walmart, Pfizer, RBC, and TD, so some of the Canadian companies are in

Government Operations committee  With respect to the Government of Canada, I think we have to start. There should be some sort of procurement policy that starts—