Thank you very much.
I'd like to thank the committee for inviting me, and the chair as well. It's a very great honour. I'd also like to thank the clerk and her team for all their assistance in enabling me to come.
As the chair mentioned, my name is Ramona Materi. I am the president of Ingenia Consulting.
What I want to do in the eight minutes available to me is cover three points. First of all I'll talk a little bit about our firm and the experience we've had in accessing international markets. Second, I will take a little bit of time to look at some of the programs. I did provide some notes for the presentation; I'm just going to touch on a couple of them. Finally, probably in the last minute or so, I just happen to have been at two very interesting presentations this past week where policy issues came up related to international trade, and I'd just like to share a couple of the points from some of these well-known presenters.
On my first point with regard to Ingenia, we're based in Vancouver, B.C. We're a small services firm. We have six professionals and a support person. The area we work in is fairly esoteric in the sense that it's labour market information, it's workforce development. You wonder where people sell those types of services. For the past four years we've done the vast majority of our work in the north of British Columbia, and those members from British Columbia will know that there are enormous multi-billion dollar investments being made in the north of British Columbia.
I'm currently writing a book to be called “British Columbia's New North: How to Build Your Business, Respect Communities—and Prosper”. An advantage of doing that is that I've learned a lot about what local governments are doing to try to support their businesses to take advantage of those opportunities. I think some of the initiatives they have could potentially be turned into a Canadian endeavour looking to support SMEs that are trying to export.
In terms of our company experience in international trade, I read the testimony from previous witnesses who've made points that sometimes people go into markets and then they pull out because they realize they don't have the capacity. I think we are an example of that.
Since 1998 I've participated in trade missions to Malaysia and Singapore; made three visits to the Asian Development Bank in Manila, twice on behalf of my company and another time on behalf of an environmental services company; I did a two-week mission in Vietnam with the British Columbia Institute of Technology; I did a trade mission to Germany and another trade mission to the U.S. Out of all of that, over the period of 16 years or so, we actually had one small contract in Vietnam where we did work.
I don't regard those missions as a failure in any way. I think they were very helpful for us to go to see, in terms of accessing, what the market could be and if those services would be available. I urge your continued support for these types of missions for companies.
In terms of just moving to my second point with regard to what some governments are doing in the north of B.C., again, I read through the previous testimony. I didn't read anyone talking about one of the programs they have where they are preparing businesses, because to build those projects you're going to have large, multinational construction firms. The Northern Development Initiative Trust, as an example, provides 50% of the cost of consulting for the companies to get ready. It's not to get ready to export, because I know there are programs that will let companies do market research and so forth, but it's actually to prepare them to be competitive. I haven't seen examples of that: where perhaps Canadian-exporting SMEs could be better prepared, get the ISO qualifications or other things they need to do before they even consider moving into an international market. That was the program there.
As you saw in the presentations I made, I think one of the things the committee could do is to consider the services. Services are a small but growing part of our exports and are very high-end jobs. I met with the trade commissioner in Vancouver. They're saying that we have architects coming in. They can sell abroad—the clean tech sector—but also the environmental services sector, not only the technologies. I think that's an important growth industry that we would want to consider.
You'll see that some of my comments are about reaching out to SMEs that don't export.
You've been hearing from a lot of experienced exporters telling you how programs have helped. If you're going to reach your goal of doubling the 10,000 number of exporters, to me you have to spend time thinking about what kinds of policies, or even funding at least, will go to outreach, and beyond preaching to the choir. That's in some of the suggestions or recommendations I made: thinking how you do that sort of outreach to qualified firms in the export sector. I've already talked about the services.
And then, as I say, in my final point on the benchmarking, are we as a country looking at our competitor countries in key markets and asking what they're doing to support their exporters? Can we learn anything from them? Are we Canadians on the ground getting outgunned by them because of what the Aussies are doing in Vietnam or China or other things? That was a another point.
To wrap up, my third point I thought was quite interesting. I attended a presentation on Monday by David Dodge, who was formerly with the Bank of Canada. He was very strongly supportive of the notion of these international trade agreements that we're signing, in the sense that he believes it increases the competitiveness of the Canadian economy in general. You've heard from previous witnesses who say that the good exporters are the companies that innovate, the companies that do new things. If they're innovative here, they're probably innovative globally. Any sort of support for that innovation I think will really help us, as does support for trade agreements.
The other presentation—and I'll close with that—was given by McKinsey & Company. It focused very much on British Columbia, but again, some of the points that were made I think could apply to the Canadian context. Basically, in a 15- to 20-year timeframe, they see the rise of some five trends: the rise of emerging markets, the power of disruptive technologies, the aging of the global population, the changing nature of capitalism, and the return of geopolitics, which I think people are well aware of.
You have your own forecasters and I appreciate that, but one of the points I thought was quite interesting—and he repeated it several times, and I think it would be helpful at the SME level—was that rather than target a country, target cities in some of these very large countries. Perhaps in China and India they might be second-tier cities. Look at them in terms of policies because some of these second-tier cities may have 20 million people and could be very attractive markets.
The other point that could help was for political leaders to work with business leaders to expand these markets.
Thank you very much.