Thank you. It's a great honour and privilege to appear before the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade. The standing committee and Canada's negotiating team have put tremendous efforts into furthering our national interests, and we are very proud of you.
I'll give you just a little background before I begin. I was born and educated in India, where I did my engineering degree and MBA. I worked for a few years with large companies in India before I emigrated to Canada. In Canada, I run an investment fund. I'm a portfolio manager of three different portfolios that invest money for Canadian families in both Canadian and foreign companies.
Today I am appearing before the committee on behalf The Indus Entrepreneurs, the organization I have been volunteering with for the last eight years. The Indus Entrepreneurs was set up in Silicon Valley in 1992 by a group of people who shared roots from the Indus region. Over the years we have grown tremendously and now have 13,000 members globally, with 65 chapters in 17 different countries.
We started our activities in Canada in 2000. In the last 13 years we have seen huge growth in Canada, and have about 1,000 members and chapters in Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver. We also have 16 different chapters in India in all the major cities there.
Our focus is to foster and nurture entrepreneurs. We want to nurture and encourage people to start on their own and help them commercialize their ideas. In this regard, we offer three different main activities.
One of them is mentoring. We offer one-to-one mentoring. Of our 13,000 members, we have 2,500 successful entrepreneurs who have agreed to share their time, their networks, and their connections to help other entrepreneurs establish business.
The second major activity we do is the TiEQuest business venture competition. In fact, we are in the midst of our ninth annual competition now, and we have received entries from 214 companies that are coming up with innovative products and services. They're competing against each other for prize money of $150,000, as well as an opportunity to get financing from Canadian venture capital funds. We are seeing projects in cloud computing, big data, social media, clean tech, diagnostic devices, and a number of other high-tech and innovative product ideas.
We are very proud of the 25 different success stories in Canada that we've been able to create through this competition over the years. These companies are well established and have hired a number of people. Some of them have also been sold to multinationals.
In the last two years, we believe that we've found our calling by starting a new initiative called the TiE Institute, where we educate youth and new Canadians so they can learn the ropes on how to become an entrepreneur. I think the opportunity was liked. We have already been able to help 300 entrepreneurs start out, helping them generate and commercialize new ideas. We were able to integrate our TiE Institute offering with our competition, as well as with our mentoring program.
In addition, outside of Canada we have been doing a number of other activities, like holding major conferences of entrepreneurs, including our TiE engine networks, as well as offering a program every month at a breakfast seminar on doing business in India. We can do this because of our huge connectivity with the entrepreneurial community globally, and specifically in India.
TiE has a singular focus on wealth creation through entrepreneurship. It inspires and educates budding entrepreneurs and provides role models and one-to-one mentorship. TiE was involved in various conservation processes during the liberalization in India in the early nineties, and we are also actively involved with social entrepreneurs because we bring in a substantial pool of intellectual capital anyway.
Canada and India have so much in common. We are parliamentary democracies, pluralistic societies, and knowledge-based economies, with high contributions to GDP by the service sector, a combination that you don't see in many other countries. CEPA will benefit both countries and, therefore, we are very proud that the committee and our negotiating team have been working hard for the last three and a half years to make this a meaningful agreement.
Based on my experience of working with entrepreneurs, I'd like to focus on four areas where I think we need some additional push.
The first of those is bilateral investment. I know there have been negotiations on this, but it has not yet been ratified by the government. We need to go way beyond foreign direct investment into other areas of investment.
There are six areas that concern us regarding investment.
There is a limit on foreign borrowing in India, which limits investors from Canada actually investing in loan products there. There is a deferential tax treatment in force for portfolio investments. In the Indian market, the bulk of the foreign investment goes through either Mauritius, Dubai, or Cyprus. For Canadian investors and Canadian portfolio managers investing in India, it is impossible for tax reasons. Also, Indian companies are very much interested in tapping into foreign capital markets. Canadian capital markets provide a huge opportunity, especially in resources, mining, and a number of sectors. Indian companies, because of regulations, are not able to tap into these capital markets here. Similarly, Indian investors are able to invest in some other countries, but they're not able to invest in mutual funds as well as portfolio investments in Canadian organizations or Canadian funds. As an individual, I am allowed to buy real estate in India, but real estate funds from Canada are not allowed to buy there. These factors create various types of hindrances in the market. Within the CEPA and the service sector specifically, I think we need to address the question of investment opportunities for both Canadians and Indians.
Secondly, we need a much greater level of cooperation in the innovation economy. It is widely recognized that entrepreneurship is the engine of economic growth. The motivation of people to become entrepreneurs today is probably the highest it's ever been, given the economic uncertainty, lack of corporate security, layoffs, as well as downsizing in large organizations. Employment generation is a huge priority, both for Canada and India. In particular, youth have the fire in their bellies to come up with innovative products and ideas. To take advantage of this, it is the responsibility of both of our governments to create opportunities for youth. We always talk about the younger population in India and a potential demographic dividend, but this demographic dividend could become a nightmare if opportunities for youth are not created. The energy of youth can be harnessed through entrepreneurship and innovation.
Thirdly, I'd like to spend a little bit of time on the movement of people. It is well-known that half of the technology companies in Silicon Valley were set up by immigrants. We find that the Canadian immigration system over the last two years has been able to attract very highly qualified people who have the ability and interest to start on their own. On the other hand, the baby boomers are retiring. They're now 65. Many banks have done surveys and reported that many small business owners and baby boomers are planning to retire or are retiring and many of their businesses are up for sale. New Canadians can step into their shoes as well as acquire these businesses and grow them. We need to grow. A start-up visa is a very positive initiative. I think we need to strengthen international cooperation as well as CEPA to allow entrepreneurs and people who want to become entrepreneurs to immigrate.
Fourthly, I believe that the state of the negotiations and the time it has taken to go through seven different rounds so far has been very similar to the environment that private entrepreneurs have been facing in India. We know that India does not rank very high in the ease of doing business there. We also know that Indians are very cost conscious and very conscious about the decision-making process.
I think what we have achieved, through our negotiations, has been quite substantial. It is probably time to close them as soon as we can and to think of the rest as an incremental process. We should try to sign CEPA as quickly as we can with whatever advantages we have obtained and then negotiate the additional things on an incremental basis at stage two or stage three of finalization. Timeliness is critical and it is even more critical for entrepreneurs who do not have a huge runway. So I urge the standing committee to work towards getting the CEPA signed as quickly as we can.
Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.
