Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the witnesses.
The discussion around the innovation and commercialization aspects of your work is interesting. I want to bring you back if I can to the small and medium-sized enterprise piece of your work.
I represent a riding in rural Atlantic Canada. In your binders you probably have a list of success stories of small and medium-sized businesses in New Brunswick that have successfully competed for federal procurement. I hope it's a long list; don't pull it out and read it. I hope you'll agree with me that there is a general sense among some small-business people, which is probably born out of a certain ignorance or intimidation around a competitive process, that the process is getting more complicated or more burdensome, and I'm not suggesting it shouldn't be. There are examples in the past where perhaps it wasn't precise enough and there were mistakes, so we are where we are. But the business people I talk to have a general sense that either they won't be able to successfully compete because the economies of scale of a company that would be in a larger region of the country or closer to Ottawa or closer to a large urban centre may have an advantage they don't have. I'm not saying it's necessarily true, but these are some of the impressions they leave on us.
I'm wondering if you could tell us what your office has done and what more could perhaps be done. It's almost an information campaign. I know you've done some good work. As I said, I meet business people who talk enthusiastically about their success, but they tend to be younger-generation business people. I'm not sure if their parents ran the company previously. They might have been adventurous to go online and look at some MERX system. There is a general hesitancy.
I'm wondering if we can do more from a regional perspective. The same must be true in other regions of the country.
I'm not just talking about New Brunswick, but also about the regions of Quebec and northern Ontario.
I have a sense that we could do more. Your previous minister, who started this in 2005—the small and medium-sized business office—represented rural Nova Scotia. I remember he used to talk to us, quite concerned about his sense that many of them don't compete because they don't understand that they can and should and that they will be successful if they offer the best value.
I'm wondering what more we can do to change that culture—in addition to what you've already done, I think quite successfully.