When we compare the opportunity that space tech provides to that of both Avro and Blackberry, the question to me is how have the incentives changed? Culturally,

When we compare the opportunity that space tech provides to that of both Avro and Blackberry, the question to me is how have the incentives changed? Culturally, we have an attachment to K-selection over r-selection of companies, meaning that instead of creating the conditions for an ecosystem of competitors to thrive, the CDN governments pick winners and turn them into state codependents who are surprised to lose to more agile companies who came up through competition. We're the talent, but not the money. It's a mix of a cultural naivety about economics and a business establishment who do just fine with a few banks and the natural resource sector - as why risk investing in early stage anything when that money is safer in bank stocks and extractive industries? Canada doesn't really benefit from space tech either, as the economics of space exploration are about mineral exploitation, which is Canada's stock in trade, and asteroid mining is a direct competition to our strip mining the north. Our R&D tax breaks skew the incentives to achieve the opposite of their intent, where some of the work on the research does get done here, but the resulting IP, revenue, and market cap gets owned by US parent entities. They use Canada as an engineering maquiladora for cheap and directly subsidized labour. An actual competitive policy would reward investment and growth of an ecosystem and not merely subsidize the piecework toil that investment pays for. We could collect from a greater number of M&A windfalls instead of just skimming income tax revenue off software developers as well. However our politics are too hobbit-like to create a serious venture ecosystem, so sure, some people will use the relative comfort of the country to produce some space tech, but I don't see the case for investing in space tech here when you can invest in more favourable markets and just use our cheap engineering talent to get you to your exit. Canada is mainly services firms that don't produce any IP or durable or acquirable value. A lot of people say it's broken, but the other thing about this place is that it's almost never broken, it just works for someone you can't see.