International Trade Committee on Nov. 8th, 2018

[Peter Fonseca, Liberal, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Halucha, you brought up the importance of brand. I can't think of a sector where a brand is more important than tourism. Tourism hasn't really come to our committee that much, but it is one industry that would touch all our ridings. It doesn't matter which MP; they're touched by tourism. Tourism takes the model where they go under the.... I don't know if it's the Canadian Tourism Commission now and then everybody feeds into it, but it's about the brand and it's helping those SMEs as an umbrella, because you could leverage the Canadian brand and Canadian Tourism Commission to be able to get your tentacles into different markets, as well as coming back this way with familiarization tours, etc. from different countries. They come to visit Canada and they set up packages.

Is that model something that you would take to other industries, where they could ride on the Government of Canada and ride on a large player?

[Paul Halucha]

I'm going to defer to my colleague, who's responsible for tourism.

[Frances McRae]

Thank you very much.

On the tourism side, it absolutely touches communities all across the country. There isn't one community that does not have—

[Peter Fonseca, Liberal, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Mostly SMEs.

[Frances McRae]

They're mostly SMEs. In fact, the minister talked about 99% of SMEs in Canada, in terms of companies, but in the tourism sector, it's even higher. It's actually very high, like 99.7%.

[Peter Fonseca, Liberal, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

I'll interject one more time. We can't forget that it's all export dollars, when people come to visit.

[Frances McRae]

That's exactly right, so building that sector is critical. I think that's why the Prime Minister asked Minister Joly, in her mandate letter, to develop a tourism strategy for Canada and I know she's taking that very seriously. The economic impact of this sector is not well understood and it has connections to different things like transport, parks and rural development. There are so many areas it touches. You're absolutely right.

Destination Canada, which is the new name of the Canadian Tourism Commission—officially, it's still in the legislation as Canadian Tourism Commission, like the Department of Industry, but it is Destination Canada—has a very comprehensive Team Canada approach where they bring all the partners under one umbrella. When you talked a little bit about whether we would do that for SMEs and exports, I think Chris would say we do.

[Peter Fonseca, Liberal, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

It just feels a little different with the others. I'm not sure if that's the case.

[Chris Moran]

We benchmark ourselves against other countries and what they're doing. We're trying to ensure that we're staying abreast and taking up the best practices, so I think there's always room for improvement and I take note of the comment.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

That wraps up the session with the officials.

Thank you very much.

We have a bit of future business that we're going to do now.

We appreciate that you've come and also that you're open to giving us some information and coming back, so thank you very much.

We're going to go in camera in two minutes.

[Proceedings continue in camera]