We spend most of our time inside the machinery of capital policy. Committee rooms, briefing documents, the slow grind of turning evidence into legislation. We know exactly what moves a finance committee and what gets filed away.
Anecdotes get filed away. Signal gets acted on.
Right now we are building a brief for the Finance Committee on extending flow-through shares to Canadian technology companies. The mechanism is proven. The data is documented. The one thing the brief still needs is you.
Five questions. Two minutes. Your answers go into the brief. Take the survey at canflowthrough.com.
Here is why we built it, and why your two minutes carry institutional weight.
The Numbers That Forced This Survey
We did not launch a survey because engagement looks good in a report. We launched it because the data crossed a line.
Just 32.4 percent of Canadian-led high-potential startups launched in 2024 were headquartered in Canada. More than two-thirds of the companies our founders built now sit somewhere else. Nearly half landed in the United States, almost double the 2019 level.
That number should stop you.
The cost compounds downstream. The Bank of Canada found that selective emigration of top earners, the engineers, researchers, and founders, accounts for up to 75 percent of the GDP gap per adult between Canada and the United States.
This is the single largest drag on Canadian productivity. Head offices, IP decisions, senior hiring, and wealth creation move with the founder. Ownership determines who benefits, and ownership is leaving.
The capital picture explains the exit. Canadian venture deal-making hit a five-year low in the first quarter of 2025, and Canadian founders based in the U.S. raised nearly twice as much capital as those who stayed. Founders read incentive structures. Then they book flights.
The Fix Already Exists. It Funds Mining.
We are not proposing an experiment. We are proposing a translation.
Canada’s flow-through share mechanism raises over C$1 billion every year for mining exploration. The infrastructure works. The tax machinery works. Investor behavior responds exactly as designed.
The international record confirms the pattern:
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The UK has deployed over £34 billion through its EIS and SEIS programs combined, proving the model works across sectors.
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Australia’s JMEI has raised more than A$1.1 billion in exploration funding since 2017.
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Canada’s own mining sector demonstrates the mechanism domestically, year after year.
Flow-through shares let companies offer investors tax benefits in exchange for financing. The investment becomes attractive without demanding large equity stakes. Capital arrives, and ownership stays anchored where the company was built.
The models exist. The question is political will. Political will responds to documented pressure. That brings us to the survey.
Why a Survey Reaches Places a Pitch Cannot
We have watched strong policy proposals die in committee because they arrived as opinion. We have watched weaker proposals pass because they arrived as evidence.
Surveys sound soft. This one has teeth, and here is the institutional logic behind it.
Committees act on stakeholder evidence
Stakeholder surveys give public agencies a mechanism for measuring sentiment and driving policy change. Without structured stakeholder input, designing and implementing good policy becomes harder and riskier for the people who have to defend it.
A committee member cannot cite a hallway conversation. A committee member can cite survey data from 500 founders and investors.
Your input becomes institutional leverage
Engaging stakeholders directly produces findings that are useful, relevant, and credible. Public affairs organizations treat this input as an essential advocacy tool because it shapes government affairs strategy at the source.
This is not participation theater. It is how policy infrastructure gets built.
When we table the brief, every aggregated answer functions as evidence. Your capital constraints, your relocation pressures, your view of the incentive gap. All of it moves from private frustration to public record.
Signal beats sentiment
We called this a signal-gathering exercise deliberately. Financial reports show what already happened. Signal from active founders and investors shows what happens next: who is planning to incorporate in Delaware, which rounds are stalling, where the next cohort of IP will land.
Committees managing the wrong metrics make the wrong decisions. This survey hands them the right ones.
What the Five Questions Actually Do
We kept it to five questions because your time has a market rate and we respect it. Each question maps to a specific gap in the committee’s current picture.
The survey captures:
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Where your capital comes from now, establishing the baseline dependence on foreign and late-stage money.
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What incentive would change your allocation or location decision, testing the flow-through thesis directly against real behavior.
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The relocation pressure you face or observe, converting the headquarters exodus from headline to firsthand testimony.
Aggregated, anonymized, and structured for a committee audience. Precise enough for the analysts, clear enough for the members who vote.
Your voice goes into the brief. That is the commitment, stated plainly, and we will honor it because the brief is stronger with you in it.
The Cost of Sitting This Out
We have learned one thing across decades of watching capital policy get made. The people who show up in the record shape the rules. The people who stay silent inherit rules shaped by someone else.
Every quarter without a tech flow-through mechanism, the pattern documented above continues. Founders arbitrage geography. Investors follow the incentive structure, because capital follows incentive structure and never opportunity alone. The GDP gap widens by the exact margin the Bank of Canada already measured.
Waiting has a price, and the data shows we are already paying it.
The committee is preparing to decide with or without your input. The brief gets written either way. The only open variable is whether it carries the weight of the people who actually build and fund Canadian companies.
Two Minutes. Five Questions. One Brief.
Here is the ask, stripped to its parts.
Go to canflowthrough.com.
Answer five questions. It takes two minutes.
Your answers go into the Finance Committee brief.
If you are a founder, your answer documents the capital gap from inside it. If you are an investor, your answer shows the committee an asset class waiting for the right structure. Either way, you convert two minutes into a line of evidence a policymaker has to reckon with.
Then send the link to one founder and one investor in your network. Signal compounds. So does silence.
We built the mechanism. The committee opened the door. The record is waiting for your name in it.
Take the survey.
