It's a very good question. In fact, I think for Canadian small and medium enterprises, it's the presence of so many Chinese students with degrees, often wanting to stay in Canada ultimately as permanent residents. They have a familiarity with the culture, the business culture, the language back in China. They have been tapped by many of our members as a source to look at China or to grow their China business. It's actually a competitive advantage in terms of how our immigration program integrates with our long-term economic interests as well.
On the other way we tap into it, I was thinking of some examples of large companies. There's one that comes to mind in Calgary, Nexen, which is now owned by the Chinese enterprise CNOOC. For five straight years, and this year for a sixth year, they have taken a six-month long exercise to identify 40 to 60 suppliers in the oil and gas industry who are suppliers to them in Canada—mainly Alberta but also B.C. and Saskatchewan. Some of them come from across Canada, generally the west, but not exclusively. They take them through training sessions in preparation for a visit to CNOOC headquarters, when they determine that those sub-suppliers have some world-leading expertise in services or in manufacturing. Then they do a trade mission back to CNOOC headquarters, not to the executive level, to the actual purchasing level within the company.
When I used to be a trade commissioner in Indonesia in the oil and gas sector, I would often say to Canadian companies that were contacting me, “If you want to sell to Indonesia, you need to sell to Exxon or to—at the time—Gulf Canada, Husky”, all of which had operations in Indonesia. It's a risk reduction strategy to get into a new geographic market that's a familiar market to them.