Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all committee members. This is a wonderful opportunity for us.
CATA has 28,000 members. We've been in existence for 30 years. We cover all of Canada and cover every sector. Our goal this year is to raise our membership above 100,000. We're growing quite fast because our industry is growing quite fast.
A lot of it, of course, has to do with the service sector, which is something else I wanted to congratulate you on. Tackling the service sector and the service side is an interesting and hugely complex task. The service sector is scary because it has some very low-paying jobs in it, but it also has some of the highest-paying jobs in Canada. In fact, the top 10 industries in terms of salary growth this year are all in the service sector. You can see some evaporation in the other sectors, but overall the service sector has 70% of our GDP and 76% of our employment. Canada is very much a service sector economy. I do want to thank you for the work you've already done on manufacturing. If we can apply that now to the service sector, Canada will be in great shape.
The ICTS, or information and communications technology portion of this, which is really the core of CATA's membership, is hugely important for the service sector, because that's where the productivity improvement comes. Almost nobody knows anything about improving productivity and innovation in the service sector. It's just beginning. So you are again to be congratulated for tackling the subject. You're among the earliest people to be doing this. It's enormously important to us that this be done.
Canada has a wonderful role to play in advancing prosperity through its productivity increases in ICTS. ICTS is Canada's golden card. It's already of course growing much faster than the rest of the economy, about 8% a year. It's a little bit less than that for employment growth--about 3.2%--but it's still better than the Canadian average. The ICTS service sector is recession-resistant in the sense that it follows the curve of the recession, if there is one, happening elsewhere in the world, so there's more time for adjustment. It's also less dependent on America and its economy, because half of our trade is done around the world, globally. This makes absolute sense, because companies in India have no prejudices against dealing with a Canadian company. While an American company would rather deal with an American firm largely, we don't have that problem around the world. Services in ICTS are largely software, so it's easy to flow our services on a frictionless globe.
Another thing to bear in mind is that Canada is a country that's a world in miniature. So when we have a product that we can sell around the world, we have an expat community somewhere in Canada with links back to India or Pakistan—which I returned from just recently—and our colleagues can help us move into that economy and can sell through to it.
Finally, I think Canada has the working stock of the knowledge economy. We have an excellent supply of highly knowledgeable people. So it looks as though ICTS will be a huge growth industry for Canada moving forward into the future.
With that, I might add that there is one area in particular.... We have a paper on this that we put together as a result of a meeting with Industry Minister Prentice last week. We put together a panel of about 20 CEOs from ICTS companies, and we gave the minister a briefing top to bottom on what the ICTS sector was about and where the opportunities are, and we expressed that there is one part that is the gold mine for global ICTS development in a service economy such as Canada has, and the globe has. It's in the gap between the development of a technology and its use by consumers. Remember that line from T.S. Elliot, something like “Between the reality and the idea...falls the shadow”? It's in that shadow that nobody is doing a good job, really. I could give you an example from the drug sector, or the communications sector, or the consumer goods sector in the service side, but I think I'll leave that to my colleague Eli, if he doesn't mind.