Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all of you for being with us today.
I'd like to start by nailing down some metrics to make sure we're all on the same page. In the figures we have from Statistics Canada, the SME sector is defined as under 100 employees for a small business, and under 500 for a medium-sized business.
Are those the figures that we all use? I see everybody nodding. Great.
According to the figures we have from the Library of Parliament as well, 99.8% of businesses that reported having employees in 2011 are in the SME sector. Only 0.2% of Canadian businesses employing in Canada have over 500 employees. Is that also a commonly accepted metric?