Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our guests here this afternoon.
First of all, we're celebrating small business week and the year of the entrepreneur. When my colleague Mr. Moore was the minister of small business and tourism, I know he was a strong advocate for small business as the economic engine that drives the economy.
Coming from a community in the Okanagan Valley in the interior of British Columbia, we have several small manufacturers. We have a fantastic trade commission that we utilize to help in the aviation industry, in forestry, and in trying to get our wine to other parts of the country--and not only Canada, but abroad. I thank you for sharing your stories here this afternoon.
As you know, there hasn't been a more active Minister of Trade than Minister Fast. In his five months in the portfolio, he has been to South America a couple of times. He visited Honduras with the Prime Minister recently. He just came back from China. He was in Japan and Morocco. As you know, it's important to have feet on the ground and to have the minister's representation. So that's fantastic. He's also working on the EU trade agreement and the other nine agreements we'll have in place in six years. So we're definitely opening markets, and we thank you for taking advantage of that.
But there have been discussions. As you know, we're looking at the global economic crisis and at our own fiscal house and are trying to look at achieving 5% reductions within the different ministries. We've heard a lot about spending more money, but can we find a way to utilize our resources more efficiently?
There's the cost-recovery model Mr. Shah alluded to for larger businesses. For SMEs, we generally talk about having over 500 employees. That's maybe 2% of the companies in Canada. So the other 98% would basically have the services provided for free.
Is that what you're alluding to as a cost-recovery model for the trade services, Mr. Shah? Does anyone want to answer that, or venture down that way and give some suggestions to the government about how we can be cost efficient?