Thank you so much for this question.
I get the sense that over the course of our conversations in this country around what to do about climate change, for the last decade or two, we tend to focus on what government can do. When we talk about the private sector, it's large corporations, for obvious reasons. Their greenhouse gas emissions are enormous and they are a really important piece of the puzzle. But when it comes to small and medium-sized enterprises in this country, individually their greenhouse gas emissions are small, but collectively they are enormous. If they are not supported in the process of the transition, we will have no hope of reaching these ambitious targets.
What we are seeing in our research is kind of exciting. We're finding from the small firms that do see social and environmental good as central to their purpose, alongside profit—and sometimes it ranks higher than growth and a dominant profit motive—that they are implementing greenhouse gas reduction strategies that are much more ambitious and creative than you might see in the larger firms. We're seeing reductions of 30% or 40% in a couple of years in small firms.
That's exciting. However, looking across the landscape of Canadian small businesses, they lack the capacity. They often have a very narrow profit margins. They might not have the technical skills outside their clear domain of the good or the service they provide. I think it's crucial to engage those small firms across the country by building capacity for sustainability transitions and decarbonization within small firms so that they don't fall by the wayside, as they have certainly over the last year and a half related to COVID. Technical skills building is really crucial among small firms, and I think that will help to accelerate the transition.