International Trade committee  I can maybe start. As I mentioned in my remarks, it's very important that our Canadian entrepreneurs continue to invest, especially for those expanding into global markets, so that they have the ability to invest either in their capacity to serve those foreign markets, or in som

International Trade committee  I have an interesting anecdote where an owner of a very important business—it's a $25-million business—didn't want to tackle the emerging markets because the owner didn't like flying. Basically he passed over the business to his two sons and now the business is entirely global in

International Trade committee  We have data on the diversification of markets. Canada relies heavily on the U.S. market. Canada's dependence on the U.S. market is much greater than what we are seeing with all the other OECD countries that have more diversification. From a risk management perspective, it is imp

International Trade committee  It's the industrial structures of those two economies, basically. If you look at Ontario, with the strong manufacturing base, manufacturers per capita export more than other businesses. The other piece is Manitoba is quite strong on the wholesale distribution side of things, so o

International Trade committee  I'm not aware of any differences. I don't know about my colleagues here.

International Trade committee  I can jump in if you want.

International Trade committee  To be honest with you, in discussions with our clients, a lot of the barriers are within the heads of our business leaders, so if we can collectively do a better job increasing the global mindset of our business leaders and Canadians in general, we'll improve our performance. An

International Trade committee  I can try to answer. The first part is that, as I mentioned, right now the performance in terms of current sales is not optimal. It's probably below what it should be. In fact, if you look at purchasing patterns right now, a lot of those purchases are done with U.S.-based compa

International Trade committee  I'll answer this question, because this is a topic we've been working on quite actively over the last three years. In fact, we just released an e-book advising entrepreneurs on how to adopt proper practices for e-commerce. My stats are a bit outdated, but something like 84% of C

International Trade committee  On the consulting side, one practice that we've started developing on the marketing front is helping firms to be found on the web. It's one thing to have a website, but you want this website to be found. To what extent is the website properly structured? I'll give you a very si

International Trade committee  No, it was just English. It's French and English. That's a relatively low-cost piece of work. One thing is helping the firms identify how to be found on Google, through search engine optimization, and so forth, and then making sure the website is structured properly so that ulti

International Trade committee  It depends how you define the breakdown, by number of clients or by dollars of commitment. If you go by the number of clients, I'd say roughly 80% of our 30,000 clients have fewer than 20 employees. As I mentioned—

International Trade committee  This is how the $4 billion breaks down. If you look at the number of transactions, you would see 80% go to the smaller firms; if you look at the dollar amount, it's the reverse. Obviously, the bigger companies receive the bigger number of dollars, so it's kind of an 80:20 rule. T

International Trade committee  There are different ways of addressing this particular challenge. One very simple one at the BDC is that we have more than 500 people who meet on a daily basis with entrepreneurs, and all of those employees have been trained on the EDC service offering and vice versa. We try to i

International Trade committee  Mr. Chair and distinguished members of the committee, I am pleased to be here with you today in support of your study on competing globally: opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses. I would first like to say a few words about the BDC and then provide you with an over