Industry committee  Yes, I think it's a great thing that the Government of Canada is actually looking out for us through IRAP. As I said, we've run through two IRAP projects and they were great. The IRAP ITAs, the whole landscape, the whole symbiotic relationship between the IT administrators as wel

Industry committee  I completely agree with you.

Industry committee  No. I think the SMEs are able to find out off line who their users are and who the client base is. But there has to be a formal way of getting it to them, and there is no such formal way. CICP is one way, but you're competing against everyone else, as I said.

Industry committee  Unfortunately, it goes back to funding. From an SME perspective, it's all about cash and cashflow management. We are given funding support to perform the first filing, but if there's a prosecution after that—and the other witnesses have pointed to that—it's really the legal fees

Industry committee  Not legal fees, but in the end, it's offsetting costs. In the end, as I said earlier, we have to decide whether we go through enforcement or not. If we don't have the cashflow to manage that, then we'll just let that litigation go and we'll move on to another product or another s

Industry committee  I don't have an answer to that. In the Government of Canada, if there is an agency that we can turn to that could facilitate that, that would be very helpful. There might already be such a department, but I'm not aware of it.

Industry committee  Simply stated, I think we need a program in Canada that allows SMEs and only SMEs to be the front-line players. There has to be a program that's targeted to SMEs, whatever the definition of an SME is within that program. They are the primes of those particular contracts, so there

Industry committee  One suggestion I have is, for example, within the CICP, a category that could be put in there just for SMEs. I come at it from an SME perspective. I didn't say that Canadian companies cannot commercialize their R and D; indeed, we can. It's just a matter of SMEs commercializing t

Industry committee  Yes, from our preliminary calculations, it doesn't impact us much.

Industry committee  I agree, but I think IP licensing, which was brought up by one of the other witnesses, is very important. I didn't realize that out of, I think it was, 100 patents in universities, only a few of them were actually licensed. If we can put in some measures to help the licensing to

Industry committee  In our preliminary calculations, I don't think we'll see a reduction. We don't have many capital expenditures, so we don't anticipate any major reductions.

Industry committee  That's a good question. I think the taxpayers themselves.... I come from the high-tech market, so when we look at the high-tech market, Ottawa's been dubbed Silicon Valley North, and there are a lot of high-tech businesses operating in Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal. In the end,

Industry committee  From our perspective, it would. If there was a reduction, we would decrease our investment in R and D. We are 16 employees at Larus, as opposed to some of the larger companies, so we have to be very judicious and cautious with our cashflow management. We heavily invest in R and D

Industry committee  That's an excellent question as well, because we've run up against IRBs a couple of times in the past. We have participated in whole-day seminars for IRBs in which OCE, at the time, brought American defence contractors into Ottawa for one-day sessions. We had a kind of meet and g

Industry committee  Yes, that is exactly it. Most of our products are OEM'd into these pipelines, and if we don't go to these defence contractors and sell them on our own products, we don't really have a chance to bid on CICP RFPs.