Finance committee  The CPP and Teachers and others are investing, but in a very limited amount compared with what they were investing in the late nineties and 2000-01.

Finance committee  The dramatic drop actually occurred in 2001, 2002, and 2003 in terms of hard dollars. In other words, we dropped from $4.5 billion to probably $2 billion over about a three-year period, but the drop continues to occur. In the U.S., what we saw was a dramatic drop in 2001, 2002, and 2003, but then, starting in 2004, it started to come back again, and they actually achieved almost the same amount of venture capital in terms of fundraising as they had in 1997 and 1998.

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  Well, there were a variety of reasons for it. The first one was obviously the bubble bursting in 2001 in terms of the high-tech community. The second one was that the rates of return in particular institutions, pension funds, and others that had invested were not that good. There's a bit of a herd mentality there, so they always leave when times are bad, when they actually should be investing.

Finance committee  You have struck the chord right there. The difficulty in Canada is that there is not a culture of risk, and certainly there is no culture of risk in the pension funds in Canada, below the largest seven or eight pools that exist. Most pension funds in Canada are too small to be able to bear the kind of risk and the research that's inevitably required for them to make investments.

Finance committee  Yes, because we expect we would raise about $300 million more each year for the next three years.

Finance committee  The U.S. government has a number of programs. Most of them are defence-related, so there is a kind of hidden agenda that occurs down there, in terms of research and development, that is very helpful.

Finance committee  Let me start off with a brief example that you will all know well. The current war that you see between the cable companies and the telephone companies is because cable is capable of putting telephones over cable systems. You are all aware of that. The technology that allows them to do that was created by a company in Vancouver about eight or nine years ago, and it was sold to the company that has 90% of the desktop boxes.

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I'm just going to highlight my statement because you already have it in your hands. I'll just add a few things. I want to thank you very much for inviting me back. Some of you probably won't remember this, but I was here two years ago, talking about the need for venture capital and the crisis we're facing.