Industry committee  I'll start taking a first shot at it. Clearly, in the jurisdiction that FedNor serves, we don't have the traditional lenders in all of our small communities. Therefore, CFDCs—and Alain was referring to their mandate—play an extremely important role in providing higher risk capita

Industry committee  Mr. Chair, three things related to your question come to mind from our perspective. First, as Alain said, we've written the criteria for the program in layman's language. It has to be easy to understand as a starting point. Second, we are engaged with all our stakeholders right

Industry committee  I can tell you on behalf of FedNor that, as a practice, any project that is rejected gets a very meaningful letter advising what the rationale was by which the project was rejected, because sometimes we misunderstand the project, or sometimes a proponent says to us that they misr

Industry committee  From FedNor's perspective, we've invested well in excess of $70 million over the last 10 years in support of some 470 different types of tourism projects whether they be waterfront developments, downtown revitalization, tourist attractions, or events that are attracting tourists

Industry committee  Absolutely. We are working right now on two great health innovation opportunities. One is called the Thunder Bay Regional Research Institute, and it is home to one of the eight cyclotrons across Canada. It has recently received its licence to not only produce isotopes, but also t

Industry committee  Mr. Chair, if I might just add also, we work quite collaboratively with FedDev and, in relation to the example that you've given, if there were benefits accruing to our communities in northern Ontario, we would probably be interested if there was a role for FedNor to play in help

Industry committee  Probably, a really good example is the Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation out of Sudbury, which is a world-class initiative. It's a partnership of the large mining companies and several universities, both in northern Ontario and southern Ontario. It is looking at driving

Industry committee  Thank you, Chairman. My name is Aime Dimatteo, and I'm the director general of FedNor. Like my colleagues' organizations, FedNor is a regional development organization that is responsible for economic development, job creation, and economic diversification for the constituency t

Official Languages committee  Yes, if I may. Clearly, in terms of the work that FedNor is trying to do through the EDI program and our regular work, we're trying to demonstrate.... We have some 16% of the northern Ontario population that is francophone, so we have a fairly large francophone population.

Official Languages committee  Sixteen per cent of the northern Ontario population is francophone, so it's in our interest—

Official Languages committee  Ultimately, it's larger percentage for us. Sixteen per cent of our population is francophone, and we have a lot of francophone communities. I'm talking about towns like Sturgeon Falls, Hearst, Cochrane and several others where the first language is French. Even though the EDI an