Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Minister and Ms. Bincoletto, for joining us this morning. We appreciate your remarks, and we appreciate your efforts, globally.
Minister, I want to seize first on your great breakdown of our government's focus on SMEs, small to medium-sized enterprises: one million, but only 40,000 exporting, and a vast majority of those only looking to the U.S.
We heard, a couple of weeks ago, from Dr. Head, from the University of British Columbia, and Dr. Wright, from York University, who suggested that the growth of SMEs and their export opportunities was critical, and how the focus on SMEs as part of the global markets action plan was a profound departure from the past, where there was more of a scattergun approach taken to trade missions.
Would you care to comment on how SMEs are particularly a part of the global markets action plan?