Industry Committee on April 25th, 2013

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

Yes, go ahead.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Go ahead, Monsieur Lapointe.

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

I started out by saying that I appreciated having the witnesses here, that their positions as senior-ranking officials were bound by terms and that I should ask questions about the results of those terms. There was absolutely nothing inappropriate, harsh or personal in what I said.

Here, we have an opportunity to find out what the policies of the government in power are, and our job is to ask questions to that end. When I ask a question, it is not out of a lack of respect. Otherwise, the official opposition's job would simply be to say, “okay, thank you very much”.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you, Monsieur Lapointe. It wasn't really a procedural point.

Go ahead, Mr. Lake. We'll restart the clock.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

That's fine. I will continue, actually, on that.

The officials who are here are the same officials who I would presume probably served—I'm not sure in the case of all three—under a Liberal government previously, and who would serve under whatever future government there might be. In my role as a parliamentary secretary I have had the opportunity to benefit from the completely non-partisan expert advice of officials across Industry Canada.

I do have a little bit of a problem, particularly with Mr. Blanchette's assertions a few minutes ago, or just the tone of his questioning. They're here because we invited them here as a committee to answer the questions we have on this issue. It's an important issue that we want to get to the bottom of, and they're here as experts and conduct themselves professionally. I just object to the tone of the questioning.

That's okay. I mean, you disagree, but I'll move on to some questions.

In regard to slide number 6, I talked earlier about the numbers of things being sold online. We have the numbers referring to the number of companies with a web presence. It is actually surprising to look at that 70% number, with only 70% of SMEs having a web presence. I want to know a bit about what may be behind those numbers, so could you perhaps just share a little bit on that? Is there a typical profile, for example, of a company that doesn't have a website? Which ones out there in that 30% are the companies that don't have websites? There might be good reasons why they don't. I don't know.

[Alain Beaudoin]

It's a very good question. I'm not sure I have all the answers, but one thing is that it's why we're going out to the field: to have a better understanding as to what's going on, to have more granularity there.

As for whether or not some firms, for example, think that they don't need to have a web presence, there might be some firms, depending on the type of business they are in, that might decide not to have a such a presence in and of itself. Again, these are firms or SMEs with employees, so the data might be capturing a corner store, for example, which might not have a web presence in and of itself and might not think they need one. In some cases, they might be highly specialized firms that are part of a very sophisticated supply chain and might not think, therefore, that they require a website.

In some cases, there might be firms that might need a website and would benefit from a website presence. That's where we hope, for example, that some firms, as part of the three programs that I referred to earlier, will see the benefits of having a web presence if they require one, and to make sure that they have a sophisticated one that will capture the attention of consumers or other firms in order for them to get the attention they require....

My apologies for not providing a great answer to that question.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

No, that's okay. That leads into a question I'm going to have in a second. But I'll follow up on that one, and the answer may be similar.

When we say web presence, oftentimes we go online and we're looking for a business, and we don't actually go to a website for the business, but they might have a Facebook page or they might have a page on someone else's website that's sort of a directory of companies in their field. Does that count as a web presence for the purposes of these types of studies?

[Alain Beaudoin]

Those figures refer to websites per se. So as I said earlier, Mr. Lake, that doesn't necessarily capture the firms that might decide not to have a website per se but might say instead that they're going to have a presence on Facebook or have a Twitter account or an account on whatever other social media, which might, from their own perspective, be more efficient for doing outreach to their consumers or to their clients.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

We're here addressing challenges that may arise or opportunities that may arise because of the digital environment evolving so rapidly, so might it be that the stats aren't actually keeping up with the evolution of the digital environment?

[Alain Beaudoin]

That's a very good point, and it's something we're mindful of. Part of the survey that we undertook with StatsCan involved sitting down with specialists to try to have as broad a scope as we possibly could and as big a sample as we could in order to better capture that digital technology or that digital environment you referred to.

As you mentioned, it's moving extremely quickly. One of the things I like to say, for example—and we're forgetting about this—is that the iPad was launched in the spring of 2010, so things have changed dramatically ever since. The digital ecosystem, the cloud, has changed dramatically.

How people use the various applications is something that was not foreseen when it was launched just a few years ago, and as for where it's going, your guess is as good as mine. Because I think what technology, especially information technology, has shown in the past is that we don't necessarily know what's going to happen in the future, which is quite exciting in and of itself.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

As we embark on the rest of this study, one of the things we probably want to do if we're going to do good work as a committee is to explore areas that maybe aren't being explored as much. We're probably spinning our wheels a little if we explore areas that have been explored 15 times already.

Where are the gaps in the knowledge right now? Do you have any thoughts on that? I'll add things to that question to give you a little more to work with.

Where are the gaps in the knowledge and what has been studied over and over again? Where do we have good information that we may not need to re-cover as we go through? Maybe as a committee we could have three or four really comprehensive reports distributed to us so we can look at them and understand them that way, but where's the new ground?

[Alain Beaudoin]

Let me try to start and maybe my colleague would have other elements to offer.

I referred earlier to the graph in the previous slide that shows the delta, the gap between investments per worker in the United States and those per worker in Canada. Maybe you could look at the explanation for that significant gap. As I said, when you look at it from an aggregate perspective, it doesn't give you a good sense of where the gaps really are or maybe where the issues are.

As I mentioned, in our study, which we hope will be done in about two months or so, we're trying to look at that issue. We won't have all the answers, because there are some challenges when it comes to data, but once we have the specifics with the StatsCan survey in June, we hope we're going to have better answers there, more granularity, that will allow us to have a better understanding as to where the gaps are moving forward.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

Okay.

I'm going to go in a completely different direction with my last question, just because it was one I wrote down early on in your presentation. I was kind of curious.

In regard to the SMEs selling online or having a web presence, has there been any research done on the abandonment rate? Is there any research on companies that have started down the path and have just abandoned the opportunity altogether because they have decided it's too cumbersome or too complicated or too expensive if they have taken the wrong path? I would think that would be a fairly common thing for companies to do.

[Alain Beaudoin]

It's an excellent question.

To my understanding, there's no data on this; there's no study on this. But you point to something that is really important when it comes to digital technologies, that the investment itself is just one component of the broad equation, because it also takes resources to implement these technologies and to keep investing and maintaining those operations.

One example of that is a website. It's one thing to have a sophisticated website to start with—let's say a firm hires a consultant to help them with the development of a website—but if they don't maintain the information on it and keep it up to date, then it will become out of date fairly quickly, and people will lose interest.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

That's really all our time.

Madame LeBlanc, I'll give you 30 seconds. That will exhaust our time here.

[Hélène LeBlanc, NDP, LaSalle—Émard, QC]

Once again, I would like to thank the witnesses for appearing before us and stress the fact that the official opposition holds government officials in the highest regard. That is why we take stands every day on cuts to services and staff across the public service.

We greatly appreciate your taking the time to answer our questions. It is always with the utmost respect that we ask them, but sometimes we have trouble getting answers. We are an opposition party, but we still want to make suggestions. And that may prompt us to ask questions to which answers from the government aren't always easy to come by.

Again, thank you ever so much for being here.

See you next time.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Merci, Madame LeBlanc.

I would like to thank you all on behalf of the committee for taking the time to come here. Your answers and your deck were greatly appreciated.

I would also remind you that there are a couple of items for you to forward to the committee. I'll make sure that the members get them accordingly.

Ladies and gentlemen, the meeting is adjourned.