Thank you, Madam Chair.
My question is for Mr. Poirier of Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters.
In my life, Madam Chair, I have owned and managed my own manufacturing company, and six years back, before entering politics, I was a part of a small, very high-end defence product manufacturing company, so I'm biased towards manufacturing. I agree with the witness that we have been seeing a declining trend in value-added exports, which I have noted with caution for so many years and have highlighted for many years.
One of the problems, Madam Chair, we face is that, especially during the last four years, the policy-makers have a limited bandwidth, and that bandwidth is used by a lot of large, foreign-owned, Canada-based manufacturers that export only to the North American market. For example, the steel producers, who have not increased their capacity during the last 10, 15, 20 years, hog the bandwidth because their market is only North America and they don't export anywhere else in the world. Because of that, many times the smaller manufacturers, the growing manufacturers and the new sunrise industries, don't get heard much. That was the part of the industry I was in. The legacy manufacturers like the auto sector, right now they're talking of investing in electric vehicles, which is a good thing, because it's the new frontier in manufacturing. However, we don't hear about manufacturing of new oil and gas, and there's the battery manufacturing we don't hear about.
Mr. Poirier, you did mention that small businesses don't have knowledge of various government programs, and to address that we have actually brought in the Canada Business app. I hope your association and others do promote the use of that business app amongst your members.
My understanding is that most of the manufacturing exports to the U.K. are basically destined to other parts of Europe. If my understanding is correct, and with Brexit at the end of this year, what will the effect be if the U.K. and European Union don't come to an agreement?
