My name is Sherry Huang. I am the CEO of a company called Sunrise Group.
We first established our company in Atlantic Canada, actually in Prince Edward Island. My husband and I moved to Prince Edward Island probably about 13 years ago, when there were hardly any immigrants on the island. We started our business 10 years ago. Now we have grown into seven companies and we are a group of companies. We have hired over 50 staff amongst all our companies.
We are involved in very diverse businesses. We have an educational institution, which we acquired from a local. The language school has been running for over 23 years. We train immigrants, and we also educate international students from all over the world. We have different academic and language programs. We also do teacher training there. It is a well-established company that we purchased from a local islander.
We are also in the business of consulting, helping build bridges between Canadian and Chinese businesses.
At the same time, we also look for very good investment opportunities, which we recognized in Cows ice cream. It's the best ice cream on the island. They have quite a few shops across Canada. We negotiated with the company, and we've become their exclusive franchisee to bring that brand name to China. Now we have quite a few stores running in China for this Canadian brand.
We also brought Anne of Green Gables to China. We published the Chinese version of the book. It was actually named one of the 50 most influential books in China.
We are also involved in investment in IT businesses.
What I am trying to demonstrate here is that we are a perfect example of what immigrants can bring to the Atlantic region. It's not only the economic development; there is culture, and there is job creation. Also, there are bridges we can build between Canada and the country the immigrant comes from. Those are all great benefits of immigrants moving to Atlantic Canada.
Immigrants are also employers. Among our seven companies we are involved in a lot of international business. We do require some staff with a multinational background. We ourselves experienced a lot of the recruiting challenges, trying to bring capable people from another country to come and work for our school or our company.
When the Atlantic pilot project first came out, I was invited to a round table discussion with the minister and everybody involved. It was quite an exciting opportunity. But now we just feel—I think I agree with what the other company just said—that the whole process is confusing in terms of where to go, the time of the process, and then the settlement agency. There's no clear path for where to start it, how to get a person in, and the evaluation criteria for someone to be a qualified candidate.
I understand that there is a lot of attention on this, and we appreciate it. There's such an opportunity to bring everybody together now to actually chat about it. The statement I was trying to make is that this will be a very great program to help Atlantic Canada and to help the businesses here. We are actually trying to fill some of the positions. We have been living in Atlantic Canada for over 10 years, and we love the area. We love the people here, but there are challenges here compared to the big cities. We do succeed in our challenges. This program could definitely help us if things are being sorted out.
This is my statement.