Madam Chair, through you to the member, in my remarks I mentioned a few things. You also used some of the words that we would: predictability, traceability, reliability, agility. I would use visibility. I would use resiliency.
The challenge for us now—and this point was raised by a few other speakers—is that in order to be agile and resilient, in order for our supply chains to be nimble and responsive, we need to reduce latency. Latency is the time it takes from a market or a consumer change in demand to a company being able to respond. Right now the latency time for most supply chains is relatively lengthy. The ability to be nimble and more resilient will require that we reduce that latency so that corporations and supply chains can react more nimbly so they can change to address consumer behaviour.
We saw that play out. We're seeing that play out in the crisis. It's that dichotomy between shortages in some products and excess in others.
What we've suggested is digitization, an area where some of the large companies that are represented as witnesses today have done a very good job. The majority of supply chains in Canada, however, are not digitized. They do not have that visibility across supply chains. That is where we think government can help to move Canada. David Montpetit talked about a national supply chain strategy, and the digitization element of supply chains needs to be a part of that conversation.
Like David and his organization, we support the necessity of a federally regulated—