Government Operations committee  Good morning, Mr. Chairman. It is a great pleasure to be here today. Given the fact that you have a very full agenda, I will reduce my opening statement to a minimum. I understand from our discussions with the committee's clerk that the principal interests today are around vote

Government Operations committee  Thank you very much for your question. As far as the Canada Business centres are concerned, the program has existed for a long time. It was therefore an issue of adding funding so that they could carry on, something which is all the more important during a recession, because we

Government Operations committee  Absolutely, yes.

Government Operations committee  There are two sides to the coin. On one side, we have the Canada Business centres, which entrepreneurs will continue to visit, as they have been doing, and will continue to do what they do to create employment. We have been very familiar with their activities over the past 15 yea

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question. One of the things about this program is that it is very similar to a number of others that we actually run because we do operate a number of infrastructure programs on a regular basis. Many of the projects that we expect to see applications from, and

Government Operations committee  Yes, and we made them put that in writing too. On the application form they have to put that information in writing for us. We will assess that to see if we think those are the right numbers. If I can speak a little bit about the communications on this, I think by the end of day

Government Operations committee  When you get the application, you see how many jobs people are proposing to create. There are two ways of going about this. As I mentioned earlier, Statistics Canada has an internationally recognized model done by statisticians--so it's not done by program people like me but by p

Government Operations committee  No, we received them last Friday. Today is Thursday. We're still going through the 800 applications. Certainly each and every one of them, in order to be accepted, is going to have to tell us exactly how many jobs they propose to create. Our due diligence process will assess whet

Government Operations committee  In the world of contribution programs generally, when you think of people looking for work who are maybe unemployed or underemployed, there are four key conversations that happen. The first one is “We'll see”. That conversation started on January 27, when people had heard about t

Government Operations committee  I can put it differently: if there's no money, there will be no evidence, because I can't sign an agreement to create evidence if I don't have the money to back up the authority to sign it.

Government Operations committee  Thank you. Well, in the case of the Canada Business Network, it was laid out in the budget itself. It's a program we have been working with for quite some time, so it's simply a continuation of work we have been doing in the past, albeit with a new amount of money that was annou

Government Operations committee  We had that conversation, but the timeline was nowhere as long as 30 days. That would have been—

Government Operations committee  It was very short, and yes, absolutely, this has been a pressing concern of my minister all along, and from the day after the budget we have been called to any number of meetings by my minister, by other departments. This has been a number one priority.

Industry committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. I'll try to keep my remarks brief and leave as much time as possible for questions. I am very pleased to be here to discuss the Supplementary Estimates for Western Economic Diversification Canada in the company of my colleagues

Industry committee  Yes.