The Canadian Council for the Americas has been active for many years. The membership is represented by companies with interest in investing in Latin American companies in Latin America and, as of late, with membership of companies from Latin America investing in Canada. We've seen the movement of Brazilian companies investing in Canada in recent years.
Activities are in the public sector and are funded basically by the contributions of the members. We have on the membership the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, as well as the Ontario export development agency, but they are just members. The funding proceeds exclusively from the membership and other activities. Our intention is to bring together businesses, to bring in leaders from both industry and government when they visit the country to communicate opportunities, and to be a lobbying group to represent the interests of our members to the government, as Mr. Frankel and I are doing here today. Our purpose is to enhance the business activities and relationships between Latin America and Canada.
We are limited in what we can do. We are not an extremely large and resourceful enterprise; we have very limited financial resources and we try to operate within that. Chambers of commerce and councils are usually not very liquid, and we try, with the support of our members, to do a lot of activities. We work together with government agencies to try to further communicate our purposes.
Among the government programs I was mentioning before, trade missions have not been very active between the region and Canada. That is not specific to any program; the general funding of our trade commissioners requires a bit more support in order for them to expand the many plans and programs they have in mind, particularly the dissemination of a database of exporters and importers that would enable them to be matched with Canadian businesses in the different countries.