OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney told a business crowd in Montreal recently that the federal government got a bit of outside help on a major piece of innovation policy in the recently passed federal budget.

“We went to Shopify and said, ‘Can you help us redesign this process?’ Somewhat embarrassingly, they came back in 48 hours and said, ‘Do this.’ We looked at it for three months and then we did what they said,” he said to laughter in the room.

Carney was speaking to Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal on Nov. 14 about the government’s scientific research and experimental development tax credit — shortened to SR&ED and pronounced a bit like “shred” in the tech community.

The prime minister bemoaned how inefficient and burdensome the process had become for the mostly small-

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