International Trade Committee on Jan. 30th, 2024

[Richard Martel, Conservative, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Can you hear me now?

[Sara Wilshaw]

We can hear the two interpreters, who are speaking at the same time. A man and a woman are speaking in English at the same time. We can hear the two interpreters speaking at the same time, but I still understood what you said.

[Richard Martel, Conservative, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Okay.

Go ahead if you want.

[Sara Wilshaw]

Okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

The interpreter's mic may still be on.

Mr. Martel, I'm going to make a suggestion. I'm going to ask you to start all over again because your time has been interrupted several times.

Let's get you started with your six minutes.

[Richard Martel, Conservative, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

So I can speak French.

Should I start again? Okay.

When it comes to Canadian business development, I'm concerned about Canada's ports. We seem to have fallen far behind other ports, especially American ports.

I would like to hear your comments on this.

Are Canada's ports, particularly the port of Vancouver, hindering the development of Canadian businesses?

[Sara Wilshaw]

Thank you very much for the question. I did understand.

I am not hearing from our clients about this, so I can't speak to—

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I'm sorry to interrupt.

We're not getting the English translation.

Today is like the first day back from a year away or something. Nothing is working right today.

Now it's okay.

Ms. Wilshaw, would you like to finish? Have you completed your answer to that question?

[Sara Wilshaw]

Very briefly, I would just say that it's probably a question better suited for Transport Canada officials, who I believe are on the second panel.

[Richard Martel, Conservative, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

I'd like to discuss the national trade corridors fund, or NTCF, announced in 2017 by Minister Garneau. This fund was supposed to support ports and businesses and increase trade in Canada. I'm hearing that people can no longer access the fund because the money disappeared in the blink of an eye. They're complaining, because it seemed like a good fund.

[Sara Wilshaw]

Thank you again for the question. Unfortunately, again, I'm going to have to defer to my colleagues at Transport Canada, because they manage the national trade corridors fund. I don't have any visibility into that or the requests that have been made. I apologize.

[Richard Martel, Conservative, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

It's a shame. I had many questions about the port of Vancouver. I thought that this fund fell under economic development and international trade.

When it comes to Export Development Canada, or EDC, which sectors are in greatest demand abroad?

[Sara Wilshaw]

I can start, Madam Chair.

In terms of the top sectors that we see by number of services offered by the trade commissioner service, there's ICT with 17% of the 52,000 services that we offered last year. Agri-food is second, then education, clean technologies, and life sciences, and then it drops from there. Those are the priority sectors that are in demand.

Mairead, can you comment for your side?

[Mairead Lavery]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Perhaps I can split my answer into two, and certainly Stuart can add some more details.

In terms of our exports today, they continue to be driven by energy, commodities—particularly agricultural commodities—metals, etc. Those are some of our big exporting sectors, including transportation. I think it's also worth noting that of Canada's exports to date, 18% relate to services. When we look at exports in general, 82% are goods and 18% are services. It's very important to remember that.

If your question is around where the sectors of opportunity are, it goes back to what many countries are framing now as energy security and food security, so lots of opportunities as it would relate to our minerals in particular, with the electrification, energy and of course our agricultural commodities for food.

There are a lot more opportunities with respect to our manufacturing and, indeed, our data industries that you could find with quantum computing or AI. Of course, that's different by region and by country, but there are many opportunities.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

You have 26 seconds.

[Richard Martel, Conservative, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

What type of energy are you talking about?

[Mairead Lavery]

Yes, absolutely. Energy refers to oil, gas and other forms, biofuels, etc.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

We move on to Mr. Sidhu for six minutes, please.

[Maninder Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thanks to our witnesses for taking the time to join us here today.

I want to say thank you to EDC and, of course, all the trade commissioners across the world and here in Canada. They do exceptional work on the ground. I've seen this first-hand.

I want to give Ms. Wilshaw a chance to highlight some of the services that the trade commissioner service provides to businesses, both here in Canada and across our network abroad.

[Sara Wilshaw]

The trade commissioner service helps exporters reach foreign markets to sell products and services. We aim to provide clients with practical advice and intelligence on foreign markets to help them make better business decisions. The trade commissioner clients are Canadian companies that have meaningful economic ties to Canada and are looking to grow their businesses through exports.

We offer four key services in all the posts we have, and I mentioned 150 locations around the world: We assess market potential; we develop market entry strategies along with the clients; we provide qualified lists of contacts and put them in touch with business opportunities; and we solve problems. That's a big category. A lot of those are big categories.

What we do is sit down with our clients and talk to them about how they would like to enter the international marketplace, what their preferred method is and where they would like to go. Then we also try to present business opportunities to them that we have heard about from particular markets, talk about whether those are a good fit for their business, put them together with key players in the different markets and hope that something succeeds out of that. We're pretty good at it these days.

[Maninder Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Definitely. There are some great stories and progress in terms of helping businesses expand into new markets around the world.

Within our Indo-Pacific strategy, a $2.3-billion strategy that we launched last year, we committed to team Canada trade missions. You highlighted some of the trade missions that Minister Ng has been doing, the most recent being in Japan.

Can you speak about some of the successes from that trade mission and the impacts it's had on the ground?

[Sara Wilshaw]

Yes, I'm happy to speak about that, Madam Chair.

In that mission, we had a pretty significant delegation of businesses. We engaged in a lot of outreach, as well, prior to that. The team on the ground tried to set it up as best they could for the inbound businesses. Then we arranged a lot of business-to-business meetings and opportunities for the companies that were participating. They sat down with local contacts who may have opportunities for them. We've already seen some results. Some non-disclosure agreements have been signed and some deals are being pursued. We're pretty excited about the prospects.

We'll continue to follow up with the companies that participated in that. Of course, the team in Japan is continuing to work with the local contacts, as well.

[Maninder Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Thank you.

I understand that, in 2018, the trade commissioner service created a team to help Canadian businesses harness the impacts of Canada's free trade agreements. As you may be aware, this government has signed a record number of trade agreements, unlocking markets around the world and billions of consumers for Canadian businesses to access.

Could you speak more about this work that the TCS team is doing?

[Sara Wilshaw]

I'm happy to, Madam Chair.

What we saw at the beginning—it's the reason why we entered into promoting the use of free trade agreements—is that we spent all that time negotiating free trade agreements, but there was a somewhat lower rate of utilization than we like seeing. People were effectively leaving money on the table, if you will. Maybe that was because they didn't know how to access the agreements or how the agreements could help them.

We decided it would be useful to spend some time and energy to do some more work to make it easier. Since then, we've put out a number of videos, vignettes, tools and training to help people access and understand the free trade agreements. We have seen the utilization rates increase. We are seeing the FTAs being used.

We're also using the FTA data to up our own game. If somebody comes to us and says they're interested in exporting something to France, we might be able to say there's another market that is perhaps better suited for them and where they would have a better advantage, given the FTAs we have in place.

[Maninder Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Thank you for that.

I'll turn to Ms. Lavery.

Thank you so much for being here today.

Part of my role, before politics, for 13 years as an international trade consultant, was making sure that businesses knew how to utilize these trade agreements. Within our Indo-Pacific strategy, we've announced an agriculture and agri-food office opening in Manila, Philippines.

Could you speak to how that would be a benefit to some of your clients?