Evidence of meeting #7 for Finance in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was infrastructure.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Robert-Falcon Ouellette Liberal Winnipeg Centre, MB
Thank you very much.
My final question is for Mr. Koss.
How much did BDC actually lose by not investing the additional $50,000, and would it have actually saved your company? What did your company exactly do? Because it was value-added, I believe.
President, Hunter Wire Products Ltd.
We were a company that started off manufacturing steel wire products, things like display stands and newspaper racks, and way back when, we made sock dryers—if you're old enough to remember what a sock dryer is. We grew into steel fabrication. We were doing work for many agricultural companies. If you look at my written brief, I mention that we were doing work for Nortel, and we were a preferred supplier for Nortel. As a small company, that is amazing. We did work for John Deere, Motor Coach, New Flyer, etc.
We don't know what BDC lost. We haven't yet seen the determination. Even the way that they handled the dissolution of the business was—it's not too strong to say—reprehensible. They didn't manage it well at all. For a paint line that would have been worth $350,000, they got salvage value of $7,500. I'm serious. It was $7,500, because they allowed somebody to just strip out whatever parts they could get, and they did that on the last day.
Can the company come back? No, not in the same way that it was. I'm not sure that we want it to, necessarily, but to lose a 70-year-old family-owned business is just a shame, because if you look at the statistics, there are so few of them around and this is another one that now has become a statistic.
Liberal
Conservative
Lisa Raitt Conservative Milton, ON
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
To Mr. Schetagne from the Canadian Association of University Teachers, obviously I'm from the previous government. You gave some strong points right off the top with respect to your disappointment in how we approached innovation. I would say this. Innovation, we know from the OECD, is difficult in Canada because we lack entrepreneurship and we lack commercialization of our basic research. That's the area we tried to focus in on. You view it as narrow Canadian commercial interests. We view it as trying to move from what's happening in the lab to putting it out into the real world.
But that's not my question. This is my question. In your presentation, I was struck by the fact that you're gearing it towards having more accessibility and greater enrolment in universities, bringing more people in. That is laudable, but the reality is that Canada does very well in that aspect. Indeed, we are number one in the OECD in terms of tertiary education. The fact is that women between 18 and 34 make up 66% of this, but do you know where I don't see women? I don't see them as university professors. What are you guys doing to make sure that female university professors are making it up through the ranks from assistant professor to associate professor to full professor, and why don't you come back to this committee with a proposal on how to fix that problem that we have in our university system?
I'd appreciate that. The next time you come in, instead of worrying about what we've done in the past, think about what's happening in the future. Take that as some advice to come in and talk to us about it, because I think it's a pressing issue. I think it's exactly why we have situations of chill with respect to women in science and we have chill with respect to women in these positions going through life, trying to figure out how to do maternity leave, still do research, and still be on that track for full professorship. I don't hear anything acknowledging that issue from you today, and I think it's a huge, pressing issue for Canadian universities.
That wasn't a question. It was my rant. Take it for what it's worth. You give me advice; I give you advice. That's the benefit of coming to a full MP panel. Thank you for listening and taking notes.
Mr. Lee, if you had any slides you wanted to spend some more time on, I'd be willing to cede my last couple of minutes to you so that you could give us some more information.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter
You have quite a bit of time.
Mr. Schetagne, do you want to respond in any way to that...?
Liberal
Associate Executive Director, Canadian Association of University Teachers
I have a couple of things.
I first would like to say that we are limited in terms of the time we have to make presentations. I would be thrilled if the FINA committee or the HUMA committee or any other committee would examine accessibility of post-secondary education and tenure-track positions for women in Canada as well as other equity groups. It would be our pleasure to testify and share our knowledge on this.
That being said, I will echo what was said by Ms. Cohen about the lack of data. There was the cancellation of the university and college administrative salary system, one of the sources of information we had used in order to know how many women were working in the university sector and how their pay compared with that of their male colleagues.
Unfortunately, those statistics were cancelled by the former government.
Conservative
Lisa Raitt Conservative Milton, ON
Look it up in a handbook. You can figure out who's a woman and who's a man, and figure out your professors—
Conservative
Lisa Raitt Conservative Milton, ON
I asked it already. I asked Mr. Lee if he would like to take some time on the slides he had.
Assistant Professor, Carleton University, As an Individual
It's powered down. I'll need the technician to log back on.
Just quickly, if I may, we're fifty-fifty female-male, by the way, at the Sprott School of Business.
I just wanted to put that on the record for Ms. Raitt—
Assistant Professor, Carleton University, As an Individual
—because I thought it was a very important question.
Assistant Professor, Carleton University, As an Individual
No, this is assistant, associate, and full, because we've been hiring a lot of female professors in the last five or seven years. I will submit to the committee a package of about 50 slides, all sourced from OECD or StatsCan, and not manipulated by me in any way, shape, or form, because that's the way I do my research. They are what I call urban legends, dealing with a whole series of issues that you'll be looking at in the finance committee: infrastructure spending, spending on science, and so forth.
It's very illuminating. I cut it down obviously because I only had five minute, but I will submit it to the committee after today, the full suite of slides. Every one is sourced with the full URL so that any MP can go and look at those graphs or slides and say, “Oh, my goodness!”
The one I really wanted to emphasize was on the diversification of the economy. There are two ways of looking at it. StatsCan is great. They produce great charts, graphs, and tables. You can look at the composition of the economy either by the number of Canadians employed in each sector or by the share of GDP. Either way it doesn't matter, we are overwhelmingly a services economy that is highly and extraordinarily diversified. I'm not saying we shouldn't be doing more. I'm just saying that the myth, the urban legend that we're not diversified, is just simply, empirically false.
Natural resources is a tiny share of Canada. I've been teaching for 29 years. Every year, I ask my students how many of them are going upstream into agriculture, natural resources, or manufacturing. In 29 years, I've had exactly zero students raise their hands. I have had, to my knowledge, zero of my students go into upstream—manufacturing, agriculture, or natural resources. They're all going downstream.
The way I like to put it, and I'll be very quick on this is that all those thousands and thousands of high-rise buildings across Canada, in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, are part of the services sector. They're not drilling for oil on the 50th floor of First Canadian Place and they're not growing potatoes on the Sun Life insurance building. That's the services sector.
So the next time an MP says we're overwhelmingly invested in oil and gas, look around at all the high-rise buildings in every city. That's where we all are.
Liberal
Assistant Professor, Carleton University, As an Individual
Potatoes are very important, sir.
Assistant Professor, Carleton University, As an Individual
Mr. Chair, I grew up on a farm so I think that's pretty important.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter
Okay, I am told that we have all the slides on our iPads. This was a paperless committee last session. The only one who really knows how that system works is probably Mr. Caron. We'll have to have a workshop someday on that.
Mr. Caron.
NDP
Guy Caron NDP Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC
Mr. Chair, when the slides are up on the screen, they are in English, without the French version. Is the presentation bilingual on TV? I am just wondering about that.
Guy Caron NDP Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC
The two languages are available on our iPads, but on the screens, it wasn't bilingual.