Evidence of meeting #13 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was need.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Director, Industrial Economic Trends, Conference Board of Canada
I talked earlier about the decline in manufacturing employment in general. There are a lot of people whose skills may be out of date. If we want to make full use of our workforce—and many employers talk about not being able to find people—we need to find ways to retrain them. I talked about that in my opening comments, that we need to make sure that we have the right skills with our workforce. There is a need for certain skills among employers. How do we get that alignment with the people we have? That's definitely something in which there's a role for government.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
I have a quick question first of all.
If I were to ask you, Scott, about your large companies and your small companies, what would be the number one thing we could do for a large company, and what would be the number one thing a small company would ask us for?
Director, Intellectual Property and Innovation Policy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
For a small company, it's probably assistance in getting into a global value chain. If they're not there already, that's going to be their ticket to scaling up. That's how they're going to get—
Director, Intellectual Property and Innovation Policy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
For large companies, I'm not sure I can give you one thing because it really depends on what the sector is.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
The large company would be more sector specific. If I'm a Bombardier, I need something totally different from a BlackBerry or whatever. It would be very specific, because I don't need all the basics to get me into a value chain or anything.
Director, Intellectual Property and Innovation Policy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
That's right. For Bombardier, if you're going to use that example, the current situation in the global market for aerospace products is such that other jurisdictions are throwing money at their local—
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
Can we say other jurisdictions are supporting their industry?
Director, Intellectual Property and Innovation Policy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
Yes, we could say that.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
We'll say it that way. Fair enough.
I'll ask the same question of you, Michael, but not from the point of view of coming from a company making a request. What would the Conference Board say they would need? It may be the same answer or it may be something different, but what would the Conference Board say that a small company needs, and what would it say a large company needs?
Director, Industrial Economic Trends, Conference Board of Canada
I don't know if I'd have an answer for small versus large companies. I agree wholeheartedly on the global value chains. It's a key way for us to make up deficiencies that we might have in our own management skills, our own skill sets, and those sorts of things.
The other thing I would say is that we need more effective partnership between our education community and our business community in terms of both the research side but also the skills side. We were talking about the labour issues. One of the key problem for any young Canadians coming out of school is that school-to-work transition, and how you get them more effectively into the workforce.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
That ties in a bit with what Mr. Lobb was saying, too. In fact, he's looking at it as a tune-up of skills, but if we're going to call a spade a spade, we're not going to be able to take someone who's going to give us access to global markets and just take someone who's in one industry and give him a little tune-up and suddenly he's going to have that skill set. That kind of dovetails into the need to be able to bring in that expertise if it doesn't exist, because it's not something that can just be.... Am I correct in saying that?
Director, Intellectual Property and Innovation Policy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
Yes, I'd say that you're absolutely correct. One of the things we often forget is that business-to-business sales is very personal. The reality of entering those global value chains is the ability to travel and get to the companies that are around the world, and to figure out how you're going to work with them. The idea of making a sale over the phone doesn't exist. You need to make those personal connections, and that's expensive.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
Then you brought up a separate point, which is the link between universities and industry. There are two parts to that. It is the ability to educate people, which takes time. Again, coming back to gaps, it's not something where we can take someone in for six months, tune him up, and put him back out there. We need to be aligned in that sense.
You also mentioned that we need to be supported more. Do you see issues with transfers of information technologies out of universities to industry? Is that a gap that you see?
Director, Industrial Economic Trends, Conference Board of Canada
At the Conference Board, we often talk about the commercialization problem. We do really good primary research, but it doesn't often turn into business practices or business products. That's again part of what I alluded to in my initial comments. We probably work too hard at, “Here is a bright idea. What do we do with it?” It's more around getting businesses involved very early on and saying, “I'm a business, and this is my list of problems. How can you potentially help me?” and get our research activities around dealing with kind of real world problems. I think we'd be much more effective at commercializing our ideas if we did that.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
So, in a summary or overall view, somehow we need to have better links between the universities and industry so that we're developing skill sets that are needed and we're also helping bring some of that technology out. You're saying that interface is not strong enough.
Director, Industrial Economic Trends, Conference Board of Canada
Yes, I would definitely say that. Yes.
Director, Intellectual Property and Innovation Policy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
I would say that the challenge is the dichotomy between intellectual curiosity and market demand, and that we still need to make sure that we are satisfying intellectual curiosity. There are hundreds of brilliant things that have come out of our university structures, but when a business is being asked to support a research project that is not answering their immediate needs, the reluctance to spend money on that research project is quite large, so we need to think down both channels and make sure that the programs that we have designed that are supporting our post-secondary institutions do both things.
Conservative
Earl Dreeshen Conservative Red Deer—Mountain View, AB
I know that Mr. Masse talked earlier about some of the great work that had been done by the Chamber of Commerce. Of course, I agree as well, coming from Red Deer, that the support the Canadian Chamber of Commerce gave western Canadian farmers for the elimination of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly was certainly important. It gives us an opportunity to take advantage of the trade deals that are so important to agriculture and manufacturing. We're seeing all of that happening right now, and people are anxious to see where that's going to go. We do have the new Canadian Wheat Board as another competitor within the marketplace, so that has worked well.
Of course, when we're dealing with trade, it's so important to make sure that we have our industry ready for when the time comes. I remember that in 2014 I had an opportunity to be at a trade mission in London where we had taken a number of businesses and manufacturers, many of them food manufacturers. We sat down with distributors going into the European Union to look at what the needs were and how they should be thinking in order to prepare for the actual requirements they have. I think that's an important issue that our industries are going to have to look at in the future as we go into the Asian countries in our trans-Pacific partnership. These are critical issues, and I think they are perhaps things that the industry is looking at.
I'll start by asking this question. Do you have that type of engagement within the organizations? Are you looking forward to ways in which you can help industry and manufacturing in order to be geared up when the time comes for these trade deals to actually take effect?
