Thank you, and thank you for the opportunity to be here today.
CFIB is a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization representing more than 108,000 small and medium-sized businesses across Canada who collectively employ more than one and a quarter million Canadians and account for $75 billion in GDP. Our members represent all sectors of the economy and are found in every region of the country.
It's important to remember that almost all Canadian businesses, 98%, are small and medium sized, and they employ 64% of Canadians and produce half of Canada's GDP. So in this year of the entrepreneur, addressing issues is of importance to them and can have a widespread impact on job creation and the economy.
There's no doubt that the Internet and e-commerce in some ways was a bit of an equalizer for smaller firms as they now have a platform to more easily expose their business far beyond their local markets, allowing them to more effectively compete with their larger counterparts.
On the other hand, as e-commerce evolved, it's created a whole new business model that's quite different from the traditional bricks-and-mortar approach to selling goods and services. For many, selling goods or services online requires a new way of thinking about their business as they need to determine how they will deal with tracking inventory, security of their payments, interprovincial and international taxation, if it applies, and shipping issues, among other things. This may well be beyond the scope of what many of them intended to do with their businesses.
As you may know, CFIB does extensive surveying of our members on a wide variety of public policy and business issues. Over the years, we have periodically explored how small businesses are adapting to the Internet and, by extension, e-commerce.
You should have a slide deck presentation in front of you that I'd like to walk you through over the next few minutes.
We first started tracking the SME adoption of Internet in 1996, and we found that by 2005, the adoption rate had actually plateaued, indicating to us that virtually all those small and medium-sized companies that would use the Internet in their business were doing so. For example, on slide 2, you'll see a chart from 2008. That was a report we did that looks at how SMEs were using telecommunications in their business. Over 90% at that point had access to high-speed Internet, with some variation by location: 94% of urban-based businesses were using the high-speed Internet, and about 82% of rural-based businesses were using high-speed Internet at the time.
Before you can determine how small businesses are using the Internet, you need to make sure they have access to affordable, reliable broadband services. Part of our intent in our 2008 report was to understand how well small businesses were being serviced by Canada's telecommunications industry. As you can see in slide 3, small firms are relatively satisfied with the technical quality of their Internet services. More importantly, though, is whether small firms are satisfied with the availability of competitive options for telecom services in their area, as this will ultimately drive price and service quality.
As you can see on slide 4, almost 42% were dissatisfied with their Internet services, and there have been some CRTC decisions, for example, that might have made it worse had there not been some intervention by government and others. For example, we were very concerned with the idea of usage-based billing, and had it been allowed to go ahead it would likely have affected the pricing of broadband services for many smaller firms who rely on the Internet, and it would have limited the options that smaller Internet service providers could offer their own clients, making the market even less competitive.
We know that most small and medium-sized enterprises are using the Internet, but how are they using it? As you can see on slide 5, over half had a website that encourages customers to visit or call their business, and a similar amount are making purchases online. Interestingly--