In terms of raising awareness, yesterday's announcement goes some of the way to addressing that, by giving the trade commissioner service more funding so that it can hire more people and be out in the community making companies aware of the services that are provided.
The other way they can understand the opportunities is through working with large companies and becoming part of a large company's supply chain. We've seen many great examples where an SME has been brought into a large company's supply chain, and then that large company has brought them into a new market such as China. It has helped them enter that market and understand all the complexity of doing so, and they're protected by the large company there.
That's not something in which there is necessarily a role for government. That's just the collaboration and co-operation amongst large and small firms. We recently asked 50 of our member companies to provide input on how many SMEs they have in their supply chain. The numbers are staggering. In a typical year, those 50 companies had 50,000 Canadian SMEs through their supply chain. This is everything from a company providing coffee at meetings to people producing highly complex and technical parts that go into a bigger product.
There's a lot of room for collaboration there, but it's the government's role to make SMEs aware of the services available.