Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
At the Information and Communications Technology Council, our worries are about having the right people in the right place at the right time to help the small businesses get to the point where they can implement e-commerce solutions. I just heard that 18% have so far implemented electronic solutions.
Our worries are about where the people are coming from, what their skills are, how we can find them, how we train them, and where they get trained. That's what we have been working on for the past 18 years of partnerships with industry and government and education. I do want to acknowledge the role that the federal government department HRSDC has played in assisting us in doing that. It has been greatly appreciated as we've moved down through the years.
Let me just switch over very quickly to the points I want to make on e-commerce adoption and questions. One of the current challenges of adoption is the competency of the small business owner to be able to implement e-commerce solutions. When I talk about competencies, I'll use a scale that I think people can relate to. Most of us can keyboard. A shipper and receiver in the back office who can keyboard and do a bar code scan, I consider that a level one. For those of you who have seen the movie Avatar, the people who developed the movie Avatar, I consider them a level 10.
Where are you on that scale? If I could raise you by one on your digital literacy, how would that help in the adoption of digital technologies, e-commerce, and everything else? So if I could look at the 82% of the companies who have not implemented e-commerce and raise their digital literacy up sufficiently that they would be able to understand this and work with the technology people, what could we accomplish in productivity?
One of the issues we've been talking about—and this one got flown a couple of years ago—is how we increase the e-commerce adoption.
While I hate to come here as a one-stop solution, one of the people who I, as a small business owner, get to see almost every month and have a long conversation with is, of course, my bank manager. For those of you who run small businesses, you understand the opportunity to have long conversations with your bank manager, if your sales have gone in the tank for a month. So using that system and being able to provide systems at a reasonable cost, with reasonable support, using their support services, how do we use the banking systems in Canada, our very successful banks, to become the implementer of SME adoption?
One of the things I also want to put a point on here as well is Canadian technology and our development. We're way behind other countries, when you see some of the things that are going on in other countries. The ability to walk up with your cellphone to a vending machine, swipe your cellphone against the vending machine, and get a soft drink of your choice, or other capabilities.... Canada is way behind, and I'm not going to comment on the reasons why; I don't play in that policy area. But we have the technology, we have the people, and we have the ways of making it go, if there's the demand for it.
My council has identified the need for 106,000 new workers in information technology roles across the economy. This is not just in the ICT companies. This is not the RIMs. This is not the HPs. This is all of the companies, including, of course, the federal government. So we're seeing a great demand. At the same time, we're seeing a significant decline in enrollments, so we're working with universities, colleges, and polytechniques on a centre of excellence approach. What we need to do is fund a few, looking at the priorities specifically around business, retail, and the domain areas. We need to look at articulation agreements with the colleges, the universities, and the polytechnics. We have a tremendous system out there that can become the source for skills for upgrading our e-commerce, 82% of the SMEs.
That's my plea. It's about the human resource side. Don't forget it. It's the part that is very important when we talk about the changes to legislation, the changes to the rules. We have to have the people with the skills to be able to respond.
Thank you.