Brison turns up the political heat on venture capital crisis

The message is getting through.

I had the chance to see the Hon. Scott Brison, the Federal Liberal Party’s Finance Critic, speak at Toronto’s Empire Club on Monday. A little birdie on Mr. Brison’s staff told me he was going to raise the temperature on Canada’s paucity of start-up and VC funding; that’s reason enough to show up. The Royal York Hotel ballroom was chock-a-block with Liberal Party luminaries, such as the Hon. Donald S. Macdonald, Hon. Jim Peterson, Rocco Rossi, Dick O’Hagan and Alf Apps. And oh do they love Mr. Brison.

Mr. Brison’s speech was part of a multi-city speech-fest underway that day by half a dozen senior members of the Liberal caucus, including their Leader Michael Ignatieff. If you’re an entrepreneur, I have good news: Mr. Brison didn’t disappoint during his address, and said that if elected, he and the team would make fixing Canada’s venture capital and R&D commercialization problem a key focus.

This position went even further than Mr. Brison’s support for the industry during the CVCA’s appearance at the House of Commons Finance Committee two weeks ago (see prior post “HoC Finance Committee appearance: good news/bad news” Oct 12-10).

Mr. Brison’s not the only one who’s paying attention, either. Just last week, the Conservative government announced two new initiaves directed squarely at Ontario entrepreneurs, who are probably suffering the most as a result of Canada’s multi-year VC crisis.

The first was a $50 million program, called Scientists and Engineers in Business, “will provide up to $50 million over four years to not-for-profit organizations and post-secondary institutions [in Southern Ontario] to help build the entrepreneurial skills of recent graduates and graduate students in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields who have developed fresh ideas for business start-ups, and support them as they bring their ideas to market, launch or expand their businesses.” Depending on who you talk to, this sounds like additional funding for places such as Communitech in Waterloo or UWO’s Tech Transfer Office, for example.

Then, on Friday, the Prime Minister announced “The Investing in Business Innovation” program, which seems to have attributes that are similar (yet quite different) to Ontario’s Emerging Technologies Fund. $190 million of co-investment type “repayable funding” (up to $1MM per) and a series of $50k individual outreach grants to Angel Networks over the next four years. Given that the CVCA had the honour to meet the PM just a few months ago, VCs are naturally pleased to see him get directly involved in our issues (see prior post “Venture Capital gets on PM’s agenda” May 25-10).

These two new initiatives appear to have had lots of design input from Angels, as well as City and regional business development organizations. And obviously intended to tap the capital residing in the Southern Ontario Development Agency. Hopefully the 1,800 national members of the CVCA will soon see some traction on the Industry’s Commercialization Support Program (see prior post “CVCA letters to Messers Flaherty, Clement and Ignatief” Dec 26-08). Not that we don’t appreciate the increased attention to the Innovation space, which we do, we already have some policy solutions to utilize.

The next time you see your Member of Parliament at a local event, or walking through an airport, mention to him/her how important it is that all parties treat Canada’s innovation economy with the same intensity that governments tackled the auto bailout. Canada’s tech and biotech firms are important employers in most regions of the land. VCs created 150,000 Canadian jobs by 2008, almost twice the current employment of Canada’s auto parts industry, the beneficiary of a $3.3 billion Canada/Ontario bailout in late 2008.

VC-backed companies grow 5x as quickly as those that aren’t. These patchwork approaches aren’t likely to do the trick (see prior post “Mass confusion in ventureland” Oct 15-10).

MRM
(this post reflects a personal opinion, and may or may not reflect the views of the CVCA and/or its members)