International Trade Committee on March 30th, 2015

[Normand St-Amour]

In the Laurentian region alone, there are possibly 60 million tapholes. If you count 40 litres per taphole, that means 2 billion litres of this product.

[Marc-André Morin, NDP, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Earlier, you talked about the potential of maple water as a rehydrating liquid for athletes.

[Normand St-Amour]

Since I only have 10 seconds left, I will try to respond very quickly. We have tested this potential on high-level athletes. They tested the product and it works well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Randy Hoback]

We'll move on to Mr. Allen.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Thank you to our witnesses for being here.

Mr. Deveau, I want to pick up on one of the comments you made with respect to foreign registration assistance.

A couple of weeks ago, as part of the expansion, the Prime Minister announced additional funding for the trade mission side—and I get the incoming trade mission side—but also the idea of new staffing for the program in the trade commissioner service. Would you see something like that as helpful, some of that money being beefed up, if you will, so the trade commissioner service could assist with that registration? How big a deal is that registration process in the other countries? Is it something that we could even expect our trade commissioner service to be able to do?

[Jean-Paul Deveau]

I don't think you can expect those people to be able to do that. The reason I say that is it can be an extremely long and involved process. For example, we're in the process of getting registration in Brazil for one of our products. To do that we have to incorporate a company, which takes three months, and we then have to go through a process of making sure we can show the efficacy of the product, which will probably take a year to happen. It depends on the industry you're talking about. Everyone's going to be different.

If you're going to do that, the challenge is that I'm talking about Brazil, so now I want one for Chile, and one for Colombia, and one for other countries, Mexico, for example. Every single time, for the most part, you're starting over again. There are some jurisdictions where they're going to say if we have a registration in the EU, and one in the United States, that's going to accelerate the process, but most countries want to have something along their own lines. Canada is certainly a country like that.

It would be very worthwhile to have a separate service falling under some organization that would have the mandate to do that. It would be measured by how much they were able to assist, particularly SMEs, to get more of these types of registrations. You would expect that a company would have a registration somewhere and then be able to say that they had this and they need help to get it out there. The faster they get those particular permissions to export their products, they can develop markets.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Ms. Kehler, do you see the same kind of thing? I picked up on one of your things, Spudnik potato equipment. Representing a large potato-growing region in Atlantic Canada, I see some of that equipment in New Brunswick as well. Do you run into the same kinds of things with equipment for your type of business as well, registration and issues like that?

[Melissa Vencatasamy, Director of Finance, CanAgro Exports Inc.]

Not in Canada. For all the manufacturers' equipment that we sell, the manufacturer takes the responsibility to get their equipment registered.

We do face it in export markets, but we're primarily in one export market, so we don't have a huge problem with that either at this point.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

But even in your export market, would the manufacturer be the one who would take the lead on that?

[Melissa Vencatasamy]

No. In the export market, that falls to our responsibility, so our office in Kazakhstan generally deals with those issues.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

All right.

Mr. Menawat, just picking up on that from you, on the process for your product registration and your comments on EDC with respect to risk, and wanting to overlay perhaps the U.S. risk profile onto other countries, I imagine that registration process, and this whole new thing, must be a critical key success factor for you.

[Dr. Arun Menawat]

Absolutely. In our case it's a substantial factor. In many countries they actually look for what your home country is doing. We look for registration in our own country first, and then we're able to take all those files into other countries. I think any support from that perspective can really shorten the commercialization time for us, which would be very significant.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

That's helpful, to understand that and get the context of how you would see a service like that working, because I'm not clear in my own mind how we would actually make that work.

Mr. Menawat, do you have any major competition in the field? Are you a first mover in the field?

[Dr. Arun Menawat]

Yes, we are definitely the first mover, and the space we're going after, quite frankly, will be multiple billions of dollars. As you can imagine, even though our market cap is in the billion-dollar range, we're challenging companies that are already $30-billion or $100-billion companies. Quite frankly, that's why I lose sleep every night, thinking of how we can become that before they get there.

We invest heavily in R and D. We have about 100 people in R and D, a very highly educated group based in Vancouver. We're growing our sales team around the world at a very rapid pace. But certainly, my number one task is to make sure that we keep the first-mover advantage.

To answer your question more directly, today I don't have significant competition, but I know it's coming. I know that some of the large companies have already announced it. My goal is to make sure, both from the perspective of intellectual property and from an ecosystem that we're building, that we maintain it, and I can assure you we will maintain that market.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

I think I have about 30 seconds left for my last question.

Quickly, on importing talent and the tax treaty, Is it just a tax issue, or is it a labour mobility issue?

[Dr. Arun Menawat]

To be very honest, it really is a tax issue. People from all over the world would love to live in Canada. That's not the issue. I can manage even the currency fluctuations by making the income in U.S. dollars, and so on, but it really is that they end up getting stuck in the tax structures.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Randy Hoback]

Ms. Chrystia Freeland, you have five minutes.

[Chrystia Freeland, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Thank you very much. It's a shame that our chairman can't ask some questions, because he's an expert in—

[The Chair, Conservative, Randy Hoback]

Actually, I'd love to do that, but please, go ahead.

[Chrystia Freeland, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

—some of these export areas, agricultural technologies to Kazakhstan.

I want to start by saying thank you so much to all the witnesses here today. As MPs we can sometimes lose sight of why we're here and what we're doing in Ottawa. Even though we've had a broken-up set of conversations with you, I have to say that for me, and I'm sure it's true for everybody else on the committee, hearing your stories of the innovative entrepreneurial work you're doing and how ambitiously you are breaking into world markets from across the country is incredibly inspiring. I think it is the view of the whole committee that it is our job to make your lives easier, ladies and gentlemen, and we are so committed to doing that. You guys are what makes Canada great, and I'm proud to be here to listen to you.

Specifically, I was very interested in the point about having two passports for people who travel for business. I was an editor at the Financial Times for many years, and British journalists can get two passports.

Is this something the other witnesses think would be a good idea? Is it a problem you have encountered?

[Jean-Paul Deveau]

Two weeks ago, two of our employees got caught and had to go to Ireland. They had no passports because they were stuck in the Brazilian embassy here in Ottawa, so we had to go that afternoon and get two new passports. Their visas came in the next week, but they are no good now because they are on the wrong passport. We have to start all over again. We do business in 80 countries, and it's the same issue, so that would be very useful.

[Dr. Arun Menawat]

I would second that big time, actually. I congratulate the team for bringing it up. I face that and I sweat over it quite a bit.

[Chrystia Freeland, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

It seems like a small thing. Maybe we could get all-party agreement on it. Maybe it could be one of our recommendations, a really specific, concrete small thing we could do.

Another very specific thing that I think Mr. Deveau mentioned was greater ease in getting visas for potential clients, investors, and people who are coming to Canada.

Can you expand on that a little bit?

[Jean-Paul Deveau]

What I was talking about was really not a visa aspect. It was particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises. When you're looking to develop some business, you really have two choices: go visit them, or have them come visit you.

If there were a program that people could use to help them finance bringing those people to Canada, from a political point of view, perhaps it would be even easier and more palatable because we'd be bringing potential clients into Canada for them to evaluate the capabilities of the manufacturers here.