So, the big success story in this article for justifying the spending tens if not hundreds of millions of Canadian government borrowed and/or taxpayers' dollars on start-ups, is the SBIR, the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, with Qualcomm and Symantec the big headliners.

Notice that there is no equivalent big Canadian government "success" story to provide justification.

Also note that while it is headquartered in the U.S. with 27,000 employees, Qualcomm employs almost the same number overseas while like most tech companies, it undoubtedly contracts out most of its hardware manufacturing to Asian plants. The other winner Symantec, has also had a lot of well-known woes in its field of cyber-security - remember Norton Anti-Virus now, Symantec Anti-Virus. Enough said.

In any event, on the weakest of supporting evidence, let's blow a few billion Canadian dollars on something to justify the government's cheer-leading existence in the tech start-up field.