The question is a relevant one. There are two parts to the agri-marketing program. The generic component is going very well, and there are no problems in that respect. The situation is different for the SME component. People submit files and they are sent to Ottawa. It's very difficult to find out what happens from that moment on. It's a black hole. We don't know who makes the decisions or how things work.
I'll give you a bit of an absurd example. There is a honey producer in Quebec that has a distributor in Japan. The name of the business is Buy Us. The business sent its file to Ottawa. The public servant who read the file interpreted the name as "Buy US", or in other words "Buy American". So he automatically dismissed the file rather than phone the people on our team and ask the appropriate questions.
There are more situations, particularly this one, which happened recently. There was another Quebec company that does business with Mexico, and there were recommendations from the consulate because the product and the marketing were excellent. The file was sent to Ottawa, but it was rejected with no consultation with our embassy in Mexico. Obviously, this has negative consequences. The response times are extremely long, between three and eight months. It makes no sense. At the end of three or eight months, the businesses have already gone elsewhere. They've moved on to something else.
Our position is this: let's do the work in Montreal, with people who know the market, and apply the same principle in Toronto, Calgary and elsewhere, so that we can get answers quicker. Some files have been rejected in some cases, but I don't want to specify which ones because they involve companies that are very well known in Quebec, especially big Quebec companies. Those files were refused for unknown reasons. We're talking here about large companies that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to have access to markets. The file was sent to Ottawa, and they get lost. I spoke earlier about an act of God, like when someone is hit by lightning. We don't know what happened or why. We only learn about it five, six, seven or eight months later.
That aspect of the program is tiresome. It interferes with the work. The people from these businesses don't have time to wait three, six or eight months: they must make their decisions immediately. When we tell them that their file has been rejected for one reason or another, when they're told the arguments for this, there should at least get an explanation, but it's another story when we bring up the fact that the business received money the previous year and so the business needs to let someone else have a turn.
That is why I said in my presentation that it must be consistent. An international market does not develop in six months or a year. It takes two or three years of investments, of human and financial resources.
The file must be analyzed with insight and we must understand that, in this area, continuity is vital. We can't tell businesses after six months that they didn't do their job or that, in the ivory tower of Ottawa, we think that they haven't been successful. We really need to give businesses the time to do their work. That's why I said earlier that it takes at least three years. We can't refuse to give financial support at the end of one year or two with ridiculous pretexts.
Does that answer your question? My response was perhaps a bit long.