Mr. Speaker, I do not for one moment want to suggest that I have had misgivings about the abilities of officials in the department to develop and maintain close working relations with the Canadian private sector.
I think all of us would recognize, and I am sure the hon. member would do so, that the world is a rapidly changing place. Technology is evolving very rapidly in a way that suggests that new approaches to the relationship between the trade commissioner service on the one hand and the Ottawa based staff on the other with the business community needs to be under constant review.
One way in which we are giving current expression to that is to examine the ways in which financing is provided to Canadian companies for their export sales. Quite obviously there are limited total resources within the country, whether they come from government or the private sector, to bring about that support.
We are talking with the banks at the moment about how we might better co-operate together on export financing. We are looking in particular, as I noted in passing in my statement, at the possibility of more financing being available to small and medium sized businesses that are interested in getting into the export world, a world that often is bewildering to them and where they need some assistance from either federal or provincial governments and from the banks to participate actively in the export world.
Therein is an example of an area where we are actively looking at some initiatives to see whether we can tie the work of the department and of the Export Development Corporation yet more closely to the private sector interests.