International Trade committee  That's a very good question. Let me frame the problem to exactly where we see the problem in our sector. If you take a company at a start-up level, what I call the incubation level, there is really no funding problem. Friends and family can fund them to get the product to pre-commercialization or maybe up to the first customer, so there is no funding gap there.

International Trade committee  Those are long questions, and I'll try to cover them all off very quickly. The GMAP, the document we have seen, I will call the framework. It has the right framework with the elements that we from the ICT sector support. Now the executional side becomes very important. Do we have the resources on the ground?

International Trade committee  I think there are two pieces here. One is the talent for the companies themselves to continue to produce and expand, the talent internally within Canada. There are really limited resources to push kids at a younger age in high school more towards STEM programs, science and math, so they can go into the technology arena.

International Trade committee  Absolutely. Again, to some of the other comments made, the staff on the ground is critical to connecting them. In any country, and take India or China, for example, as a market, it doesn't really matter, any of the Asian countries, it's tough to do business there. It's a lot easier for an SME to go down to Boston and try to peddle his stuff than to go to Mumbai.

International Trade committee  Yes, goods and people. Tariff has very little impact for the ICT sector. There are some component pieces that would get tariff and the range is probably between 7 and 20. None of our members really have a major issue with the tariff items.

International Trade committee  Well, human capital is a big issue now. We all know what's getting played out in the media with the temporary foreign workers. In the ICT sector today, we are running between 2% and 3% unemployment, which means we can't find people to fill the jobs. There are two ways to fill it: you grow your home-grown talent, so we ask the schools to send them to the STEM program and graduate with the technical knowledge; and you import talent, access global talent.

International Trade committee  Thank you very much for inviting ITAC to this forum. We are pleased to submit our position on this issue. To frame the discussion, we represent the information technology companies in Canada. Our members are multinationals, but 75% of our members are SMEs across the country. There are 30,000 ICT companies across Canada.

Finance committee  Yes, we do. In fact, over the last couple of days we did sign a MOU with Canada Health Infoway to start looking at certification of health software across the country, just because we have 14 jurisdictions and every jurisdiction's needs are different. We're trying to find a way to simplify and standardize those so the throughput for R and D and costs could go down.

Finance committee  It will impact both the patient side and the clinician side, because informatics covers the whole domain at this stage, so patient care will definitely get improved. If you have a better technology implemented in hospitals, the wait times obviously will go down. It is a big issue for our country, the amount of money that we spend on the health sector, and every jurisdiction is slightly different from a vendor's point of view.

Finance committee  Okay. I think we agree with that, because we even asked the Ontario government, in our submission, to revisit exactly what's going on in the Quebec market on the venture side.

Finance committee  Right now the plan has leverage to grow to $1 billion, including some private-sector funding. That is very good news. What we don't have is a sense of how it is going to be doled out by each of the sectors and regions; we're still waiting for that. The only way to make it work is to get the recipients engaged in design and implementation, rather than just the money managers.

Finance committee  I think it's a good question. In our submission when the announcement came out, we did go back to the proposal that's on the table from the Quebec government. Directionally, it has the right approaches. Whether or not the ratios and the numbers exactly need to be replicated, that needs to be revisited.

Finance committee  I don't think there is an exact number, but we know that the SR and ED changes that were made equalled about $300 million worth of funding being removed. If you take that and extrapolate it, particularly in a technology sector, it would be equal to somewhere between 1,800 and 2,000 jobs on a sum-sustaining basis.

Finance committee  Yes, or the equivalent of that: it is money being removed from the system. We're basically extracting funds out of the economy and haven't poured them back, so it has a direct impact on jobs.

Finance committee  That is correct.