Thank you to all the witnesses for being with us today. I have a question for each of you, and I'll start with Mr. Chan. I want to talk about trade diversification and small and medium-sized enterprises, or SMEs.
We all know that we're up against a very serious economic threat in this country and that part of our response has to be to diversify our trade to other partners, aside from the U.S., and to build better interprovincial trade corridors across the country.
Despite all the work being done by the Prime Minister and by first ministers across the country to sign trade deals, the signing of a trade deal is not what strengthens the economy. It is the actual shipping of Canadian goods to those partners that will allow our businesses to thrive and to keep our workers employed. I think we need to figure out how we're going to get those goods to market in short order.
We have been talking a lot at this committee about the major projects that this bill enables, but there is a lot of work in the area of small and medium-sized enterprises that we need to be thinking about. I'm wondering if our colleagues from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce could talk to us specifically about small and medium-sized businesses in this country and how you think this bill might affect them.