Thank you for inviting me to speak today.
I'm not a lobbyist. I'm a business owner. We have a small company in Scarborough. It was started off by my father-in-law as a washing machine repair company, and it's grown to 92 people. We have over four patents for new technology developed here in Canada and we hope to export worldwide.
Ninety-two per cent of all companies in Canada are 100 people and below. I want to reiterate that. It's a big difference between small business and large business, and a lot different from the United States, which tends to have a gradual increase in business size. We have a lot of small companies, and then we have large companies.
Small and medium-sized companies are the lifeblood of the economy. We pay for everything. Without us, there are no schools, no hospitals and probably no politicians as well. We have to keep that in mind. What we do is put money into the economy. We give people jobs so they can pay taxes.
If you want to know what you can do to help businesses, the best thing you can do is to go back to your ridings and talk to those businesses. Don't make them come to you. Go to them, because we're just trying to survive. We're trying to keep the lights on and people paid.
You've asked me here to give you my advice on how to help business. Here's what we need. First of all, and most importantly, we need to be able to compete. We're not competitive in Canada due to the fact that our energy pricing is not competitive. I pay three times what I would pay for electricity if I moved my business to the United States. I also have to deal with cap and trade and carbon pricing. That adds costs that make it impossible for me to compete worldwide.
You can negotiate all the trade deals you like, but if we're not competitive, we're not going to be able to compete with those trade deals, and it will just be a vehicle for other countries dumping their product into ours.
There is also the tariff situation. Right now, there's talk of tariff waivers for LNG. We supply to the oil and gas industry. That will prevent fabricators, coders and steel companies from working on projects that are Canadian. We think that's fundamentally unfair.
The tariff situation is very inconsistent. One of our members makes screws and bolts. He tries to source as many Canadian products as he can, but there's one product that he can only source in the United States. He pays a tariff on that, and then he has to charge more to his Canadian customers who pick up that specific nut and bolt. He has a very innovative nut and bolt. Probably people think that's boring, but those nuts and bolts last a lot longer than anyone else's nuts and bolts. He has to charge more to his Canadian company. When he exports them to U.S. companies, he does get a tariff waiver, but those U.S. companies end up selling back to the Canadian companies for less than what he could sell to the Canadian companies. We think that's unfair.
We need assistance in exporting our innovation. We need ways to take small and medium-sized businesses that have great innovation and technology and pair them up with larger companies that have footprints to get our products to market. That would be a very helpful way to get our products to market.
We need equity and fairness. About six weeks ago, I saw the economic strategy tables. I was horrified, because when you read those economic strategy tables, it doesn't say we're going to create a level playing field where people can rise or fail on their own innovation. It says, we're going to pick the winners and losers. We're not going to help everybody. We're going to decide who's going to succeed and who will fail. We think, for a government that talks about equity and fairness, that is fundamentally not fair and not equitable.
We are also concerned about the strategic innovation fund. Again, we want everyone to be able to succeed and fail on their own merit, and not have government pick the winners and losers.
We need pipelines built so that we can have affordable energy and be able to sell our products. We're concerned about C-69 because we believe it will make us less competitive.
We need the trade commissioners to be more effective. They don't need to be diplomats. They need to be salespeople. For four years, I've been trying to get one of my patented products, which could be utilized by navies around the world, to Australia. I have yet to get an appointment with the Australian navy through our trade commissioners. We need our trade commissioners to help us set up appointments so that we can get in and show them our technology, which is world class.
I'm concerned that if we don't do some things to make us more competitive, then companies will leave. We've seen companies leave or take their growth and move it outside to the United States, so our wonderful success and innovation in Canada will be another country's success story. We think that's going to be a tragedy.