Thank you very much, Mr. Benoit.
We are very happy to be here today, and I am honoured to represent the Canadian Clean Technology Coalition.
I'd like to focus on three major things in my presentation today.
The first is to address the question of how significant Canadian clean technology exports can be over the next five to ten years as part of energy innovation and the diversification of our energy products. The second thing I'd like to highlight is the relationship between those exports and those of SMEs within our overall merchandise exports. The third thing will be the actual markets that Canadian companies are interested in exporting to, which are not necessarily what one would expect.
If you'd like to refer to the materials that have been provided, I am going to start with page 3. There is a graph that projects under both a mid-growth and a high-growth scenario that Canadian clean technology exports have the potential to grow to either $10.6 billion or $17.5 billion from their current base of about $5.2 billion. These are conservative estimates insofar as we've taken a relatively small or a mid-size approach to the global markets. For those of you who are visual, there are some graphs to demonstrate that.
I'd like to set the Canadian clean technology exports in the context of SME exports, because obviously these are SMEs and it's an area that is not that well understood.
If you'd like to refer to the graph on page 4, you'll see the value of all non-resources SME exports versus that of exports of energy-related natural resources. You'll see that these two graphs actually converged over the period of 2002 to 2005-06, and since then have really diverged. It might be worth spending a moment to understand what some of the causes for that divergence may be.
Natural resources energy-related exports obviously follow the price of oil and gas, and SME non-resources exports have grown notwithstanding the rise of the Canadian dollar. These are companies that are small but are still able to export, notwithstanding the fact that the Canadian dollar is very strong.
What they don't cope with very well, as was seen in 2007, is a global liquidity crisis. You can see indicated in green on the graph that there is quite a substantial decline from 2007 to 2009. This refers back to my comments in the committee meeting of March 7 when I referred to the need for some thinking and policy discussion around access to debt for these companies, because their projects are going to need to be financed, and their ability to access debt will be a significant driver in terms of their ability to grow and to export.
For those of you who would like to continue to follow the graphs, I suggest you refer to page 11, which brings together the value of SME exports and adds to the graph the value of the Canadian dollar. You can see that our Canadian SMEs are quite capable of exporting, notwithstanding the rise of the Canadian dollar. This is not necessarily widely known. I have to say that the green line on the graph is the product of some relatively new data, which was obtained through a new data set that Statistics Canada has produced, which is by size of firm, so it is something to consider.
I'll close by saying that if you'd like to refer to page 15, Canadian clean technology companies are quite ambitious in terms of the countries to which they wish to export. You see on this page an indication of the top five countries in terms of their interest for exports. They are in order: U.S., Germany, U.K., France, and Brazil. These are obviously very sophisticated difficult markets to export to. The top five countries in terms of demonstration projects—this is technology that is perhaps at an earlier stage—are: U.S., Germany, U.K., France, and Mexico.
Those are some indications of the priorities for diversification of markets.
If you wish to refer to how Canadian companies think of the BRIC countries for exports and BRIC countries for demonstration projects, they're indicated on that page as well.
You may recall that the Canadian Clean Technology Coalition thinks of the industry through 10 different sectors. This information, in terms of which countries are priorities, is available for each of those 10 sectors. I have provided three copies of the report, one for each party, and I have the pages that refer to the sector priority markets, so for each of those 10 sectors, which countries are the priorities. That does vary from one subsector to the next.
With that, I'll close my remarks.
Thank you very much.