Good morning. Thank you again for inviting me to address a subject that is of tremendous interest to me.
I listened with interest to the presentation to you on Tuesday of my colleague Joseph Jordan, newly appointed to the US SBA, so I'm actually very pleased to have this question put to me.
Obviously, there are some substantial differences between the US SBA and OSME, not the least of which is that they're an agency and we are a sector within a federal department. They have an act that governs their mandate. We essentially have a mandate from the Federal Accountability Act action plan. They have $700 million; we have $7 million. They have 1,000 field staff; I have 25. They're aiming for 23% of the procurement envelope as a stand-aside, and we're at 49% of Public Works contracts with Canadian companies located in Canada.
Those would be the starting points for the discussion of differences, but I'm much more interested in discussing the similarities. What really struck me on Tuesday, listening to him, is that if you had erased US SBA and put in Government of Canada...he was extremely articulate about the ways in which SMEs can be helped and the many ways in which a government can do it, and actually the ways in which the Government of Canada does do it.
While it is true that OSME does not have the full mandate that US SBA has, the various pieces of the US SBA mandate are covered by various departments in the Government of Canada. For example, as you heard from my colleague, John Connell, this morning, Industry Canada and BDC do the loan piece, so that's not within the mandate of OSME.
If you parsed out the elements that other departments do, you would be left with the nugget or kernel of the five elements that Mr. Jordan outlined for you, which are very similar to OSME. While OSME's mandate is on a much smaller scale, it's very similar to what the US SBA does.
I thought I'd run through a few of the examples. For example, the US SBA and OSME both work with agencies and other government departments. With OSME, we focus mainly on Public Works because we do have a common service provider for procurement, which is Public Works, and we focus on the policies and procedures so that small business interests will be taken into account in commodity management, etc. We strive to improve the links between the supply and the demand side of procurement to influence change within government procurement, such as ongoing work we're doing with the Treasury Board Secretariat and Industry Canada. We work very closely with other partners in the government.
Like the US SBA, OSME educates and trains SMEs to encourage and assist them to participate in federal government procurement through multiple seminars and outreach programs. We facilitate discussions between SMEs and other government departments. Our regional round tables with like-minded organizations are very successful. Similarly, we do use technology to streamline our relationship. For example, like the US SBA, we have a variety of systems that enable suppliers and small businesses to access.... In Canada it would be small and medium businesses. I keep using “small business” because Joe Jordan referred to small business. That's how they define it in the United States, though you may have noted that all of his examples would have been more than our small and medium businesses. I think the language is pretty comparable. What they do and what we do is focus on the sector of the economy that isn't large multinationals, essentially. It's a definition they've chosen as a result of trade agreements.
Anyway, we use technology to enable supplier access to federal government procurement.