Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Good morning to you and the members of the committee. Thank you for the invitation to appear before you today. I am the chief economist of Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters. I do that work here out of Calgary, and I'm here to represent the o

Finance committee  Thank you for your question. When I lived in Ottawa, a few years ago, I spoke my second language a lot, but after living here for six years now, I need to practice it more. So I will answer in my first language. Obviously, the issue of productivity isn't one that has an easy an

Finance committee  I would definitely not say that it's been a magic bullet solution. I think this is something that is a necessary step along the way, and it's one of the pieces of the puzzle to unlock the productivity problem, to mix my metaphors. In this case here, what we're specifically looki

International Trade committee  I was on that side of the table.

International Trade committee  It was nine years.

International Trade committee  First of all, we agree. I agree completely with Victoria's list. There are some excellent suggestions in there. One of the points she made that I'd like to elaborate on, or offer our own take on, is the tax policy issue. I think that it's important. We 100% agree that it's impor

International Trade committee  I think it would be fair to say that most of the companies we represent are small manufacturers, and just to generalize, they are too busy trying to do what it is they're doing on a day-to-day basis to compete. One of the challenges that we as an association have is trying to hel

International Trade committee  I think so. I think Victoria's idea about starting up your company and saying, “Welcome to the business world. Here are all the services that are available to you,”.... In the past we've recommended using a concierge service from government. There are a lot of good government ser

International Trade committee  Thank you.

Status of Women committee  Thank you very much. As you mentioned, I am the chief economist for Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters. Elise, in addition to being the director of government affairs at 3M Canada, is also a member of our national board and the chair of our women in manufacturing working gro

Status of Women committee  As Elise mentioned, the report that we came out with is two weeks old. The intent with that was largely problem identification. Now that we've done that, we're about to move on to those kinds of next steps to address those issues. It's something that businesses themselves have to

Status of Women committee  One of the things that we did with this survey was.... It's impossible to control exactly who is going to respond to your survey, so we did ask a number of filtering questions that we'd get different kinds of responses on, and one of those was so we could filter out men. We had 8

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. In fact, if you go to the CME website, we have a larger version of this report there and the appendix has detailed survey results. If there is more information that you would like that is not in the survey results, I'd be happy to provide that as well.

Status of Women committee  When we did the main report of our...the one that this is based on, there were a number of issues—I should say benefits—that came up in the research related to that. One was the increase in innovation and productivity that comes from having women in the manufacturing workforce. A

Status of Women committee  We did. In the barriers that were listed we had two that overlapped. One is the work-life balance, and one is whether they thought they could meet family commitments without damaging their current and future career advancement. We didn't delve into the solutions end of it, speci