I'll try to leave some time for my colleague as well.
With respect to corporate tax structure and budgeting on corporate tax structure, within the Quebec aerospace industry we benefit from a crédit d'impôt for a lot of organizations in terms of research and development and we encourage any kind of structure that would support that kind of initiative.
As I said in my opening remarks, there's a large concern that the SMEs, being mom and pop shops where you have very specialized services, are a great place for a young person out of school to get a lot of training. In the end, that person leaves and goes to work for a larger organization, and that SME is left looking for yet another person to train but can never actually get up the food chain. If there were an incentive that could be provided through the corporate tax structure to actually incentivize SMEs, to actually credit them for the fact that they're not simply providing young persons with work, they're actually providing them with an apprenticeship or a training program, that would be very interesting.
With respect to regulatory barriers, I'm not an expert across the board, but one of them that is specific is the one that was brought up by your colleague with respect to ITAR, the International Trade in Arms Regulations that are in place within the United States and deal with the transfer of sensitive or military sensitive technology or information. And it's always in the sense of transferring information from the United States outside its borders.
We also have a program within Canada called the controlled goods directorate, the CGD I think it's called, in which we essentially also manage this military sensitive information. A barrier, in that sense, can come between a space company or an aerospace company when you're actually trying to get to the point where you're having a technical discussion about a sale or a product. If there is not a technical assistance agreement, a TAA, in place between the two organizations, it can make it difficult for that conversation to continue.
That can hinder us globally in the context of rapid competitive bids, in that if an RFP comes out on the street for an opportunity, the American companies would have a distinct advantage because they would have access to all the technical information to respond to that RFP immediately, whereas access to a Canadian company may be slower because it would have to get permission to have access.
Any way that could be sped up would be helpful. I don't know if there's much that can be done about it, but on the other hand, there are perhaps ways around it. What we should try to focus on is maybe the path of least resistance. When we have major programs, as we were talking about, of military procurement that involve large American companies, there are industrial regional benefits associated with that. It puts the onus back on those American companies to try to make the information more available to the Canadian companies, because they may be looking for IRBs back to Canada.
Thank you.