International Trade committee  Thank you and good afternoon.

International Trade committee  No, I prefer to use English.

International Trade committee  Thank you for inviting us to present from this location. My name us Tiziana Tedesco. I'm the director of trade for the Italian Chamber of Commerce of Ontario. The Italian Chamber of Commerce of Ontario, or ICCO, was founded in the 1930s as an organization, and was later recogn

International Trade committee  No. I was just going to say that this is mainly what we do, and the kind of services we provide. That's about it, actually.

International Trade committee  This is something we do independently. Basically, what we have found is that small and medium-sized companies often have a lot of interest in doing business here in Canada. At the same time, they don't have the strength to go on their own. They need more assistance locally. We

International Trade committee  Thanks to our members, we usually help the companies come to meet with people. For example, we assist them in opening up a business here, but we won't do all the documentation and provide everything. What we do is set up an appointment for them with a financial institution or wit

International Trade committee  Usually we ask our members for support. If we have a law firm among our members and there's an Italian company that wants to come and set up business here, we're going to tell them to come and use use our offices, and we'll put them in touch with a law firm that can help them wit

International Trade committee  Right now I'm thinking about CETA, obviously, the agreement between the EU and Canada. This year we have organized three seminars for our members and for Italian companies we've done some video conferencing and web seminars with experts from here to explain what CETA is all about

International Trade committee  Yes. We think the local Italian-Canadian business community here is fundamental and is a great point of reference and starting point for the development of trade and business relations between companies from Canada and Italy. It's important for us. We like to say that we have a d

International Trade committee  You're intending Canadian small and medium-sized...?

International Trade committee  When we're in touch with small and medium-sized companies and they're interested in doing business in Italy or in Europe, we work very closely with our network of offices in Italy and in Europe. As I said, we're part of EUCCAN. We collaborate a lot with the chambers of commerce i

International Trade committee  I think I mentioned briefly before that we've organized CETA seminars for our members here and for companies and member companies that are located in Italy. We liaise with local business associations in Italy. Through them we were able to invite their members to web seminars. We

International Trade committee  There is a lot of interest, especially among the Italian companies. They really see Canada as a place to do business now, more even than in the past. The message we try to give them is to come to Canada, that it's a gateway to North America, that Canada is the place to start.

International Trade committee  We're part of a group of local associations here in Toronto—organizations like ours that do business with their respective countries. There's the Toronto Chinese Business Association, the Federation of Portuguese-Canadian Business & Professionals, and the Indo-Canada Chamber

International Trade committee  Absolutely we do, yes.