Mr. Chair, through you to the member, I appreciate the question. I think it's an important, foundation-setting question.
I want to start with having the members understand that disruption in the supply chain is not new. It existed before, and supply chain professionals have worked through those disruptions. The challenge, of course, is that there are too many potential points of failure within the chain. If I'm going to answer the question and suggest where we feel there are points of relief, and what we talk to our members about.... They're not easy. We will always have those in the supply chain who are able to manage the disruptions, but the changes we need in order to be more resilient are more fundamental, and larger, and will require more significant investment.
Let me paint a picture of a couple of these.
Today, corporations have different visibility into their supply chain. Those that are more mature and have the resources may be able to see what we would call tier one, tier two or tier three suppliers. You can imagine that, in a chain, you have tier one, or those that supply you. Tier two supplies your suppliers. Downstream, you may have multiple levels, depending on how complex your corporation is. Many Canadian corporations—again, many of these challenges are not unique to Canada—only have the ability to see tier one and maybe tier two. They don't have the visibility, downstream, into their supply chains to understand exactly where things are coming from.
Recently, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we surveyed our members and asked them if they felt they had the necessary visibility to adjust to that geopolitical situation. Only 14% thought they had the requisite visibility. A number of them didn't realize they had suppliers in Russia or Ukraine, because these were tier two, tier three or tier four. Visibility—the transparency of the supply chain—is critically important as we go forward. Fixing that will not be easy.
The other change is automation. We've gotten very good at automation at certain points in the supply chain. For example, warehouses with robotic automation do a great job. Go to anybody's distribution centre and you'll see incredible automation, but go to one of our ports and you won't see that same level of automation. You'll see things that are manual and things that are paper. Again, the ability to automate cannot just be a solution in one aspect of the supply chain. It's great if a warehouse is fully automated, but if things haven't been able to get there because there is no automation, then, again, the system breaks down.
Visibility, transparency, automation, and certainly infrastructure investments—and you can count those as some of them—are all things we feel will be fundamental. As I suggested, they're not going to be easy, fast or cheap to resolve, and it will take a mindset change for many within the supply chain. However, they're going to be necessary if we're truly going to be resilient going forward.