International Trade Committee on May 6th, 2014

[Jayson Myers]

I have maybe a couple of ideas around communication. These are areas where we are actually partnering with trade commissioners, EDC, other agencies, and other trade associations.

I think we need a single window of access particularly for small companies. It would really make it easy to identify and connect with those partners that are able to help them. We talk about them navigating their way through supply chains but they need help to navigate their way through the agencies that can actually help them. That would go a long way.

In terms of the role that associations like Joy's play and ours play, we can never talk enough about both the services that are available and the opportunities that are available. We can never do enough in terms of trying to network especially smaller companies with their peers to really understand what it takes to do business in those markets. I don't think we can ever do enough to build person-to-person relationships because at the end of the day international business is not about contracts, it's about people. Unless you are able to build those personal relationships, and small companies have the time and effort and dedication to invest in building those personal relationships, it's not going to work. I was always told when you go to China you have Peking duck, but when you have noodles you really know that you're in a position where you can do business and your partner trusts you.

So those are some of the things that I think we can do. It's not just government. I have to say it's not just government itself. I think the trade associations have a huge role to play here in mobilizing companies.

We talk about innovation and the challenges in connecting researchers to companies that can use their research at the end of the day to commercialize, but we don't do enough to connect the small companies with the great technologies with those companies that are exporting and could take those technologies and commercialize them in international markets. I think that's another opportunity.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Very good.

Our time has gone.

Mr. Pacetti, the floor is yours.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

There is a hand up. I think she wants to say something.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Joy, did you have a quick response?

[Joy Nott]

I was just going to say very quickly that something CME is actually championing right now is something called ECN, the enterprise Canada network. It's a website with the idea that small companies and large companies are going to be able to go to this website and find potential partners in foreign settings. So I won't say any more than that, but there are ways of communicating that I think we need to explore more.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Thank you very much.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

What was the name of that again?

[Joy Nott]

The enterprise Canada network, ECN, and CME is actually championing it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Very good.

Mr. Pacetti.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the witnesses for coming forward.

I have one quick question for Mr. Myers.

Correct me if I am wrong. In the beginning of your presentation you spoke about different things that need to be done in terms of business investment. You want to grow investment and capacity building. Were you advocating for the government to invest in these areas directly or indirectly? Did I understand you correctly?

[Jayson Myers]

I think more to align policy and programs to support.... If we're focusing on international business development, and I am only thinking from the point of view of, say, a small exporter looking for new customers in new markets, they are going to have to really customize a new product for that marketplace, which means probably investing more in research and development, and certainly more in new technology, more in a new process there. So it's not necessarily that—

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

So how do you see the government's role in that?

[Jayson Myers]

I think there's a need for better alignment. We have a number of programs that are out there: NRC's IRAP for example, the work that FedDev is doing, which is excellent. FedDev is investing in productivity improvements on the part of small businesses in southern Ontario, if those productivity improvements or product improvements are tied to export development. I think that's the type of alignment we need. We need to see that more from the agencies like NRC.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

What I'm seeing with small and medium-sized companies trying to get to the next level is that some will be missing investment in just human resources because they don't have the capacity.

[Jayson Myers]

Definitely.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

So the owner will take the initiative to get into the market and then not be able to have the time or resource—it could be anywhere, like I said, time or even money—and move on to the next step. Or it could be that you have a dynamic salesman who's able to acquire all these sales, but then doesn't have the support, or the support team is there but there's no finishing afterwards.

[Jayson Myers]

Right.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

So there are different areas. I didn't even think about the research and development. Some companies are able to do the research and development and then not be able to bring it to market, whereas you have others that are able to bring their product to market, but then not be able to innovate. There's no one solution that can help companies.

[Jayson Myers]

No, there's not, and there's no silver bullet either here. There's nothing that any government can do to assure the success of a company that, from a business point of view, doesn't have the right business model, doesn't have the right product, or at the end of the day doesn't have the capacity.

It does come down to business strategy, and I think the most important thing here is aligning the services that are there behind this notion of, if companies are going to grow in Canada, it's probably not going to be in the domestic market itself, with one exception. I think that's the resource, the infrastructure, and the oil and gas projects across the country that provide a certain segment of industry with a tremendous platform to take new technologies and new products globally.

But at the end of the day that international development has to be very important. It's not just the federal government. It's also the need for the provincial governments, other agencies, and industry associations like ourselves to align better.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

I want to get a question in to Ms. Nott.

You were talking, Ms. Nott, about border security versus import policy. When we're looking at Canada and the EU, I believe it was a lady from UPS who said that if we're going to sign a free trade agreement with the EU, perhaps have a fast-track line for the goods or the services that are coming through. Would that be one of the solutions? If we're going to prioritize a certain market, we can't have the goods being held up for days, weeks, and months or else there's no advantage to having a free trade agreement, and the flow of goods meaning both ways. For a company like UPS, containers have to be leaving full one way and coming back full the other way for it to be rentable.

[Joy Nott]

I'm not exactly sure what your question is, but would it help the overall situation that I was talking about before, an import policy? There are two aspects to trade. There is the aspect of trade that is the actual physical movement of goods. That's the box at the border, the box on trucks and airplanes that we think about. The other aspect of it is the actual policy that I was talking about.

It's not always necessarily CBSA and cucumbers and brine versus pickles. Sometimes it can be other government agencies as well. Sticking with the food analogy, just think for a moment that Health Canada insists, for example, that in Canada, for any baking product that has flour in it, it needs to be fortified flour, and it's fortified with a number of different vitamins and minerals. Yet in the EU, for example, to use yours, it's actually forbidden to fortify flour.

So it's not that I envision a lot of baked bread or anything else transiting the ocean between Europe and Canada. I think it would be a bit stale by the time it got here. But for processed foods and anything that contains flour, right now we have a sort of in-house baked in—pardon the pun—trade barrier, where the fact that in Canada, if you're going to produce goods, even if you mean to produce them for the EU market, you can't have unfortified flour being used in a food process— [Technical difficulty--Editor]

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

The flour industry cut her off.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

I think we've lost her again, but your time has gone.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

Surprise, surprise.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

You were a little over.

So we'll now move to Mr. Shory and we'll try to reconnect.