Government Operations Committee on April 28th, 2009

[Joseph Jordan]

That's an excellent question. I'm going to answer it in a few ways.

One, we do focus on all small businesses. We don't necessarily carve out certain types. However, the threshold for what constitutes a small business is going to be different with each industry, so to some degree that's going to show that we're looking at each industry differently. In terms of the contracting opportunities, I've often heard it referred to this way: there are main street businesses, which are the ones you're referring to, your dry cleaners, your grocery stores, etc., and then there are your high-growth, high-impact types of small businesses, and that's often where the net new job creation is going to come from and a lot of that growth piece.

So when we talk about what a small business is, we don't put one of those categories above or below the other. When we look at who is most likely to compete for federal contracts, it's going to be more those high-growth, high-impact types of businesses. So while we're not looking to “protect” either one, we want to make sure that when any of them choose to play in the federal contracting arena, they're being dealt with fairly and have a fair opportunity to get an appropriate share of federal contracts. But as you mentioned, it's more likely that one group will self-select into that process than the other.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

It sounds as though your organization plays an important role in terms of a communication piece between government agencies and departments and also to those small businesses that would like to contract with the federal government. I'm very interested in terms of your communication efforts, with two different agencies within the government. What does your communication and your effort to communicate look like? Do you bring the people who lead these departments and these agencies to round table discussions? How exactly does that work? That's my first question.

The second is, what does the communication to small business look like? What efforts do you make in communicating what you can offer as an office to those small businesses? So we're looking at what you have found to be effective communication both internally and externally.

[Joseph Jordan]

The simplest answer to your first question on the agencies and whether we bring them together is yes, and doing so is incredibly effective. More specifically, there are a few tools that we use. We have a chief acquisition officer round table, a meeting where we do bring all those heads of the procuring centres together, just as you mentioned.

We also, within each agency, have an individual whose title is a bit of a mouthful. It's the office of small and disadvantaged business utilization. OSDBU is the acronym. That person is charged with making sure that small businesses are getting their seat at the table and in all conversations within that agency.

Last--and this is still on the agency part, and I'll get to the small business part--we have those procurement centre representatives sitting with the people actually issuing the contracts and making sure that where the rubber meets the road it's actually happening, that small businesses are getting their fair share.

So it's from the top, in terms of strategy level and round table discussions, all the way down to the individual contract level that we're educating, monitoring, and helping agencies buy from small businesses.

On the small business side, there are a number of things we do. We have a number of field offices spread throughout the country. Small business owners can come in there for business development counselling, for education and resources, for those types of things. We put an immense amount of data and information online, in the federal business opportunity, or FedBizOpps, website and on a number of other websites, which has been helpful.

Then last--because sometimes you can reach the point where there's almost too much information out there, and it's very difficult for a small business owner to get to all of it--we help facilitate what we call business matchmaking events. At these we'll bring together a group of small businesses and agencies and sometimes large businesses in a room or in a convention hall and allow them to get to know each other and meet each other and understand who can provide what goods and services or, from a small business perspective, who is most likely to be buying what I'm selling. Because it's very hard as a small business owner to get through the process and understand what government agency, whether it be federal or state as was mentioned before, and what large business may be issuing subcontracts after winning a prime award. So we want to facilitate that flow as much as possible.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

If you don't mind letting us know, what is the budget for your office? Obviously your office has been around for some time, so you don't have maybe the issues and the challenges that our office does in terms of communicating the fact that you actually exist. It sounds like small businesses in the United States know that you exist.

But if you can just give us a budget for your office, we'll do the math later on and figure out how it compares to our Canadian office. That may be helpful for committee members.

[Joseph Jordan]

Sure. I want to get it into the most granular way so it's most helpful, but that's a bit of a challenge. I may need to follow up with a specific line-by-line.

The SBA's budget overall, including for the field, the loan program management, my office, and some of the other education and outreach offices, is about $700 million. The office of government contracting and business development budget I would need to follow up on, only because there are certain parts that I would need to carve out. If you were just trying to do one function.... There are economies of scale that I enjoy because of the larger agency, but I'm happy to go back and try to parse it out. But it's about $700 million for the SBA's budget.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Thank you very much.

Before we wrap up, I have two quick questions from the chair. Do you have a function--and forgive me, because I may not be using the right terms--within the Small Business Administration that you would call a champion of winners, or a champion of the new guys on the block, of the little guy who has the great idea but needs somebody in government to notice him and move it? Do you have somebody who does that type of function?

[Joseph Jordan]

Mr. Chair, I would say that everybody at the SBA needs to be doing that.

To be more specific, we do have an office of communications and public liaison, which should be telling the stories of the successful little guys so that everybody becomes a little more comfortable with the fact that these great innovative companies are providing a high quality of goods and services.

We have an office of entrepreneurial development to help the new companies that are starting up get the education, training, support, and outreach they need and to help champion their cause.

We have programs for a number of socio-economic groups so that the particular needs of those groups are being voiced and have a seat at every table.

You have the people within my government contracting organization championing each of these pieces out to the agencies.

Also, if any of these small businesses just feel somewhat frustrated by the heavy hand of the government and feel they've been wronged in some way, we have what we call an ombudsman, who can facilitate answers to their concerns within our agency or across the government. That's another voice of the little guy, so to speak. That's housed within the SBA, but it should give them a voice and a seat at every table throughout the government.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

That's great. I'll take that as a qualified yes.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Clearly there's an advocacy function, if not in one place, in several components of your administration. The education component is there. It sounds like you have a pretty well-rounded organization. We're--

[Joseph Jordan]

Mr. Chair, if I may interrupt for one minute, my colleagues in our office of advocacy would be quite disappointed if they knew I was so remiss as to not mention them specifically. We do have an independent office of advocacy within the SBA. Not to repeat myself, they have their own independent authority to voice the concerns and study the needs of small businesses. We absolutely do have that as well. You're right.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Having said that, then, we can now close this part of the meeting.

On behalf of all of our colleagues, of course, who are elected from all across Canada--and you've probably noticed we're working in two languages--we're very grateful to our American friends for sharing this information. I hope that at some point we can reciprocate. We try to do that as much as we can.

We wish you all well down there with the challenges extant economically and health-wise these days. I guess we're all in the same boat in North America. We thank you very much and we thank your administration. Maybe at some time in the future we can collaborate again.

[Joseph Jordan]

I would enjoy that.

Thank you, or merci, for having me. It has been a pleasure. If I can be helpful in the future, please let me know.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Thank you very much again.

Colleagues, we have a couple of minor business items that we have to deal with. If I had my clerk here, I could get right to them.

One thing we have in front of us is this. We've been informally circulating a possible motion to deal with Industry Canada. As you know, we have a meeting coming up this Thursday dealing with these same subjects, and Industry Canada appears to have been reluctant, up to this stage, to agree to attend.

We can handle this in one of two ways. We can adopt an order that would facilitate the crystallization of their willingness, if I can put it that way, or we can ourselves agree to find another informal way of ensuring attendance.

Mr. Warkentin.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

I was just speaking with the clerk. We have secured additional witnesses for that meeting from Public Works and from the office of small business as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

We have other witnesses at the same meeting. That's correct.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

Could you tell us who is attending? I think it's important. What I don't want to see happen again is bringing whole piles of witnesses and not having the opportunity to get to the bottom of the issues.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

I do understand that. That's a reasonable point.

I think our researcher was of the view that Industry Canada has a fairly conspicuous small business data...the department gathers data on small businesses, and it seemed pretty reasonable to me that we shouldn't go ahead and make decisions about small business and procurement without the benefit of that information.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

I appreciate that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Just so you know, the individual involved is—I won't mention the name, but he is the director general of the small business policy branch. There is another person in the department we had invited, and I don't think we got a reasonably appropriate response. I don't think we can complete our work here without at least checking with them. If they were to write us a letter and say, “I am sorry, we have absolutely no information about small business that could ever be of use to your committee”, then we could walk on, but at this point I don't feel we can.

Mr. Warkentin.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

What's important to me is that we speak to Public Works at this point. My sense is that this isn't a problem with small business. My belief is that there is a problem in terms of the receptiveness to small business, and I just want to find out what the challenge is there. So I think Public Works and the office of small business would be helpful in getting to the bottom of that.

I appreciate and I'm fine with folks from Industry, but I don't think they will address some of my paramount concerns.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

We are happy to get all your questions answered and get witnesses here for you.

Your chair is suggesting we should have these witnesses, and it may be that in order to get them here we're going to have to firm up a little bit. It's as simple as that: if members are reluctant to firm up, if this is just a social club—come if you want, that's okay. You're the members; you can decide. The chair takes a slightly different view. We have an important public interest function here. When we want witnesses, we should be able to get them. That's how Parliament was designed.

Ms. Hall Findlay.

[Martha Hall Findlay, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

If you want this to get firmed up—I have found the last number of meetings frustrating, because we had asked for a report dealing with the whole question of GENS shared services bundling. We expected that report to be in March. It is now near the end of April. We don't have that. And so we have responded to specific lobby interests, we have responded to specific people with different vested interests in the whole thing, but we are still hamstrung without that report.

So quite frankly, I'm happy to have whatever witnesses we can have and to be as firm as we want to be in terms of requiring them, but we're still hamstrung. I don't feel as if I'm in a position to ask more effective questions until I find out what PWGSC is actually saying about its procurement processes in this context. Maybe you have more information about where the report is.

[The Chair, Liberal, Derek Lee]

Okay, you've moved the issue from the one I had raised to another one. We can ask the clerk about the report we've been waiting for, but I'd like to deal—