Evidence of meeting #132 for International Trade in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was companies.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
Randy Hoback Conservative Prince Albert, SK
If we don't have the standards here, we can't export because of that. So, it's a Canadian standard preventing you from exporting, not—
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
Randy Hoback Conservative Prince Albert, SK
It's another example of seeing the Canadian government preventing the export from happening, not the customers saying they can't take it. The beef sector is saying the same thing. I'm hearing this over and over again. It's a repeating thing.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
Randy Hoback Conservative Prince Albert, SK
One of the other things that I find really interesting is, we're talking about opening up new markets, yet we're not meeting the regulations to homologations, like those issues that were faced in different regulations and different countries.
Are there any suggestions on what we should be doing here in Canada? When you decide to, let's say, go into the European Union, and you have a source in Canada, you say, “Here are the homologation requirements to go into these countries in Europe. Here is the testing platform we have in Canada, and, if you test here in Canada and it passes, it meets the homologation requirements there.”
Are you seeing anything like that happening here in Canada?
12:30 p.m.
President, Northern Cables Inc.
There are international standards boards, the Standards Council of Canada, and CANENA—
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
12:30 p.m.
President, Northern Cables Inc.
What they do is specify a test method, and then different labs are—
12:30 p.m.
President, Northern Cables Inc.
We've sent products to Mexico to be tested to their standard, and then duplicated that testing in Chicago for correlation. There's a pretty good standards network, and there are a lot of cables, telecom and fibre optics that are international already, but in mining cable, specifically, and power cables in North America, we're stuck with this inch system.
November 27th, 2018 / 12:30 p.m.
Conservative
Randy Hoback Conservative Prince Albert, SK
Okay.
Ms. Peters, I want to talk to you about the next generation.
We're seeing structural change happening in electronics, and we're seeing disruptive technologies coming forward. One of them is 3-D printing. One of the things I find really interesting is that we're bringing in all these regulations, but all of a sudden I can just download a file that came from who knows where, print it off, and throw it on Kijiji tomorrow.
How are we, as lawmakers and legislators, supposed to deal with that? This is coming in, and it's going to grow, and grow and grow. We've seen one example of a handgun. You can get a 3-D print of a handgun, and everybody's up in arms, but the reality is that the technology is there now.
How do we position ourselves, and how do we take advantage of it? We want to be the draftsmen, the people designing that drawing that's going out on the web, and selling it. How do we take advantage of that?
12:30 p.m.
Chief Strategy Officer, Communitech
I think one of the ways to take advantage of that is to leverage the companies that are either building that technology or are using that technology to adapt their business in other industries. I can't speak to the downloadable bans.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Randy Hoback Conservative Prince Albert, SK
How do we regulate that? How do you put in standards?
You talked about your standard borders, Mr. Stafford, where you have standards set up. I can come in, from the middle of nowhere, and all of a sudden have a cable...well, cable might not be a good example, but you have a piece, a gadget and print it. You actually 3-D print it. There are no government standards; there's nothing, but I've printed it off at home and as you say, I could throw it on Kijiji tomorrow.
12:35 p.m.
President, Northern Cables Inc.
If you're printing a product that doesn't have a standard.... For a lot of products, they need a CSA or UL standard, so the onus would go back to those bodies to ensure that the product has a UL. You hear about recalls. In our industry, we hear about recalls all the time, with things coming in from offshore, mostly at the Dollar Store, that have a false UL symbol on them, so there's a big recall. To protect some of that intellectual property, some of the products we make have a whole graphic tag that goes on the label or the product, which is sold to us by UL or CSA.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Randy Hoback Conservative Prince Albert, SK
That's the thing though. You're building it and selling it.
This is a situation where they're actually manufacturing it at home and just decide to sell it tomorrow. You may be able to have a fake CSA standard or you may not. I'm just trying to look for some guidance and advice on taking advantage of that because the days of shipping stuff in containers might have changed. We might just send a drawing over to that 3-D facility in China and all of a sudden it's printing out 10,000 of those tomorrow.
How do we get into that market? How do we take advantage of that opportunity?
Carla, maybe you have some ideas because you talked about—
12:35 p.m.
President, Northern Cables Inc.
Excuse me, but I think we have to protect the integrity of the standard. That UL symbol or the CSA symbol has to have value. If it's caught being counterfeited or if it's not, that's what the government should be doing. We'll live to the standard. Just protect us, so that everybody has to live to the standard.
12:35 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Northern Cables Inc.
I would also like to make one point which perhaps—I apologize if, in the presentation, we've talked about stuff that's not as apparent to you as it is to us because we're in this industry. We are trading with countries that do not have currencies that float and are traded. What happens is it allows a lot of these countries to bring things into this country, at values which perhaps they're happy with, but we can't even buy the raw materials at these price levels.
How does one compete against this? This is a huge problem going forward. If this continues, you're going to decimate any manufacturing left in this country because everything is going to come in at levels that nobody can afford to compete at. Even already for us, yes we have grown significantly, but we have also been across the river. We're looking in the United States and we're saying that if we can't do business in Canada, we might find ourselves having to look somewhere else, if we cannot stay here and compete. In the United States, as you know, they're becoming more strict on their importation. This value of goods coming in, in currency, is a big issue.
12:35 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Cape Breton Partnership
For our organizations, specifically around the importing of the materials and the raw goods, I know some of our producers are saying again, that for them, it's the bigger picture stuff. If they can't compete on this, they need to at least be able to compete on things like transportation, so that they can get it out of here and out of the country. It's a little heavy—
12:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Mark Eyking
We've just a couple more minutes left and I think, Mr. Choquette, you had a question.
12:35 p.m.
NDP
François Choquette NDP Drummond, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I will find my question again. I'm sure it's here somewhere. I think it was Ms. Arsenault who raised the issue.
I think that it was you, Madam Arsenault, who talked about having a one-stop shop, where SMEs could go to access all the programs provided by the government. Why is that so important and why should we do it?
12:35 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Cape Breton Partnership
From the businesses that I talked to, the comments I heard over and over again were not that there are not enough programs or that the programs don't exist. Don't get me wrong; they're not perfect, but there are lots. The biggest challenge most of our small and medium-sized businesses have is that again, they don't know where to even begin to look.
Organizations like ours and organizations like Communitech and others are on the ground. We know who those businesses are. I can pick up the phone and call the CEO and ask him specifically about the issue or challenge. They know to call us and our community because we are that point person today, so across the country, I'm not suggesting a cookie-cutter approach, but I am suggesting that individual communities have their own resource in the community that can be that focal point, as the ones who have those business connections.
12:40 p.m.
Chief Strategy Officer, Communitech
Absolutely. One of the ways you can help to advance that is by embedding individuals. Whether it's a trade commissioner or an adviser from BDC, you can embed those folks in regions so they are close by to act as a resource, and as Ms. Arsenault said, they have the opportunity to engage the hundreds or thousands of companies that have that day-to-day relationship with an organization like ours. It becomes a one-to-many connection.
12:40 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Mark Eyking
Thank you very much.
That wraps it up.
Thank you, witnesses, for your submissions and the good dialogue we had. Thank you for coming from across the country. It's a hard time of year to travel.
I have two quick motions for the committee to deal with, and if I don't hear anything against them we'll assume these motions are carried.
One motion is dealing with our having gone a little over budget on travel for our impact of tariffs study. We had more meetings, so it requires some $11,000 more.
(Motion agreed to)
The second thing is a clerical matter. Mr. Hoback brought it up. Apparently, besides Santiago, Chile, we're also going to Valparaiso, Chile. It has to be written into our submission.
Is that all good?
(Motion agreed to)