Yes. Thank you for that question.
We have quickly realized that our large Canadian companies, the multinationals, have the resources to penetrate new markets and have the resources to expand their presence in markets that matter. What we realize is that our Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises are woefully unaware of the tools that their federal government has made and continues to make available to them to be successful, as they look for export opportunities outside of Canada and outside of North America.
The global markets action plan recognizes that, and that's why there's such a special place in the GMAP for SMEs. They are going to drive much of our future export growth around the world. That's why we want to make sure that we also develop a plan, which we're in the process of doing, to promote the tools that the federal government, and by the way, the provincial governments as well, make available to SMEs, so that they can safely start to explore those new markets they probably should have explored many years ago.
I've long ago come to the conclusion that Canadian companies are highly risk averse. They're very cautious, probably more so than companies in some of our key trading partners, and it takes quite something to push them over the line to where they say, “Okay, we’re going to actually take that next step and start to explore these new markets and start to develop our export potential”.
I believe the global markets action plan is a very significant step in the right direction to do that, but it's not going to be only me as international trade minister and my ministerial colleagues and our MP colleagues who will be responsible for promoting those opportunities for SMEs. We're also going to work with the industry associations across Canada, to make it very clear to them that we want them to be our partners as we communicate with our SMEs this incredible world of opportunity out there that they haven't yet tapped into.