Thank you.
I'll go in reverse order, maybe. I'd say that BDC, EDC, and the trade commissioner service work quite closely with groups like ours—chambers of commerce and others across the country—but they're limited in their own capacity to do so as well. They have only so many people. I would say that they leverage it, but the reach is still fairly limited.
Not every company belongs to an association that has access to that type of information, so that is a limiting factor. I'm sure they could also reach out to their local MPs' offices, and they would direct them as well. Often, however, companies just don't know where to go; they're really stuck and they're not sure where to start the journey, and so that becomes an issue.
That capacity building you're talking about comes in two forms. One is that we need to have a focused exercise on educating SMEs as to what the opportunities are. Through groups such as ours, or directly from the government, or through groups like the chambers at the local level, there can never be too much education on export opportunities and export barriers. Frankly, we just don't see enough of it out there.
To some degree you have to drag the horse to water to make it drink. I believe that. It's not just because you show them the water that they are going to drink. You have to really force them through this.
There are different things we could be doing in Canada to drive those things. We've talked, for example, about whether you put in place an export tax credit, as other countries have done, for example, that would put a lower tax rate on profits made on foreign earnings to directly encourage growth internationally. Would there be tax measures like these that you could put in place? Could we put in place mentorship programs to pair large companies with smaller companies that have done it before? Those are some of the things we have talked about.
The other capacity is strictly a physical capacity. There's only so much by way of goods that a company can put out before it has to expand its plants and facilities. For the most part, Canadian plants—not every single plant, but generally speaking—are at or over capacity already. Their ability to say that tomorrow they're going to start sending x product to Brazil just doesn't exist. It's going to take a long-term strategy.
It could be many years in the making. It starts with investment in new products, typically, which leads to expansion of plants and then gets them into the actual export market. Those first couple of stages come first, however: you have to invest in the new products and then you have to expand plant capacity in order to grow those markets. That's typically where the gaps lie.