Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to speak.
I put together a ten-page document, and in the interest of brevity I will skip to what I call my top ten.
When I was asked to talk here, it was about how small to medium-sized enterprises in manufacturing companies like ours are being affected by the economy. My whole topic is really about interdependence.
Small to medium-sized enterprises like Edson are very dependent upon large manufacturing enterprises. We supply equipment to large multinational and national companies. The interdependence of small companies like ours is really that, if they're here, we have an opportunity to play with them to get going. As we have flourished over 45 years, we get to follow these large companies around. It's just basic market economics and there's no magic to it.
My general concern on the more global side is that Canada's demographics are against us. We're basically a very small country and getting older, whereas the United States is getting much larger and much younger. If we're going to have any industrial base left in Canada, we need to quickly adjust those demographics.
We also have aging infrastructure, whether it's seaports, airports, roads, highways, or sewers; and lack of energy--electricity or carbon-based energy. We have all these different challenges affecting manufacturers, yet we don't seem to be able to respond to them, so it's kind of a paradox. On top of that, we have the aging workforce I mentioned earlier. But I think there's a way that can all be addressed, and our very integrated economy can respond to that and become very vibrant again.
Just to let you know, we have about 60 to 100 people and are located in Hamilton. We've been around for 45 years, and our customers include Proctor and Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft Foods, and so forth. They rely upon us. They buy our equipment to make themselves more efficient .
My concern on the demographic side is that we won't have an opportunity to even defend the natural resources we have. We'll sell them off to pay for our social programs, as we are with our oil, gas, and potentially water. Further to that, we won't have a young enough market segment to even respond to that from a workforce standpoint. Ultimately we are going to become deindustrialized very quickly and heavily reliant on services to our older generation.
I don't know if the Conservative government has outlawed it, but certainly the word “innovation” has become inappropriate and they're replacing it with something else. I heard this on the news, and whether or not it's true I don't know. At the end of the day it's going to be all about knowledge. Whether it's a small company or a large company, the only way Canadian companies are going to compete will be based upon knowledge and the use of that knowledge in innovation in both machinery and process. If we don't have any innovation in either how we do things or what we use to manufacture things, we'll never compete against low labour cost countries. That's a given.
I'll just jump to recommended actions.
We have to understand that there's an interdependence between governments and large manufacturers or large enterprises. They don't care about borders; governments do. How are we going to entice large companies to invest in Canada?
Before I get to that, the first thing we can do to help the industrial sector--and you've heard it before--is provide accelerated writeoffs for capital equipment. That will spur the purchase of equipment to become more competitive.
I'll put it this way. If I can write off a piece of equipment in the United States in 18 months, up here it takes up to five years. So I have to ask myself, if I'm going to invest $1 to become more efficient, where do I do it, in the U.S. or here? It's quite obvious. If there is any one thing, one concrete action, that this committee can take away, just do that.
The second thing is a little larger. We have to attract the large manufacturing enterprises to Canada.