Ontario Finance Committee appearance

Whew. That was fast.

The CVCA GR team of Exec Director Richard Remillard and I appeared before the Ontario Legislature’s Finance Committee, made our few points, responded to two questions, and promptly left. And not ’cause we weren’t having fun.

I can assure you that one never wants to be the last industry group on the list of morning presenters, with an 11:45am slot and a noon scheduled adjornment. It’s not that we didn’t get our promised 15 minutes of presentation and MPP question time (see prior post “Summing up Ontario’s VC industry in 5 minutes flat” Jan 31-10), but that it seems just so darn impossible to get anything accomplished in such a short timeframe.

For them or for us.

Imagine if every VC said this to the entrepreneurial world: ok, ten minutes for presentations, and five for questions. And out you go; I now know what to do.

Our strategy was simple. If we had 15 minutes, cut the presentation to a few hundred words in an effort to allow more time for questions. That we did, but I’m not sure we helped our cause any by cutting back on our pitch in the hopes that questions were preferable to hearing yourself talk.

We carried the CVCA’s five policy points:

• Put more capital into the Ontario Venture Capital Fund, and ensure that this capital is actually deployed into funds

• Revisit the decision to phase out the retail fund tax credit; the Governments in five other Provinces are enhancing their’s just as Ontario is closing the door on the industry

• Introduce incentives for major contractors with government to invest in venture capital funds

• Allow corporations to treat their investments in venture capital funds on the same basis (i.e., as deductions) as their R&D expenditures

• Consider improvements to provincial R&D programs to leverage the success of the SR&ED program

The MPPs were extremely attentive, and several from both sides of the aisle came up to us post-hearing to get more details. Hopefully, we made some progress on behalf of the failing Innovation Economy.

We’ll know soon enough.

MRM