Natural Resources committee  I'm Jocelyn Bamford from the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Ontario.

Natural Resources committee  My name is Jocelyn Bamford. I represent the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada. We represent primarily small and medium-sized businesses in manufacturing and other areas. We want to thank you for having us here today, because very often the voices of s

Natural Resources committee  Absolutely.

Natural Resources committee  Nothing could be more untrue and completely offensive, because small and medium-sized businesses are the lifeblood of the economy. We are the ones who keep people employed and get people to pay taxes to give to politicians so they can do the program. If you don't have us, you don

Natural Resources committee  Absolutely, and we saw—

Natural Resources committee  No, absolutely. When cap and trade first came in, at first there was an information session. I wasn't going to go, because I thought, “I'm a low emitter, and that's none of my business.” I went, and I was horrified to find that it's the exact opposite. The large emitters, the la

Natural Resources committee  We—

Natural Resources committee  We do not have a.... We believe efficiency will reduce our costs and will reduce greenhouse gases and—

Natural Resources committee  We want to do our part, and we have done our part. In fact, manufacturing has driven greenhouse gases down 30.9%—

International Trade committee  Thank you for inviting me to speak today. I'm not a lobbyist. I'm a business owner. We have a small company in Scarborough. It was started off by my father-in-law as a washing machine repair company, and it's grown to 92 people. We have over four patents for new technology devel

International Trade committee  I don't. I spoke from my heart.

International Trade committee  I will just talk about some of the companies in my area that are coalition members. There's this great Indian baked goods company called Surati. If you ever want the best pistachio cookie made right here in Canada, that's the place to go. They were going to expand into a building

International Trade committee  Can I just comment on that? We have an aging workforce, especially in the skilled labour pool. If you go out to our plant and look at our people, you see amazingly talented people, but they're getting close to retirement. We have taken all the trades out of the public high school

International Trade committee  There's nowhere to train them, so we need to get on that skills gap. It's an easy and not expensive fix to do, I would argue, but a lot of our colleges have also decided that they want to be universities, so again, we don't have skilled labour coming out of the college system.

International Trade committee  I think if you're going to be hiring new people, you need to hire people who are not diplomats. You need to hire salespeople, people who can go in and get you an appointment with whoever you want to target in a foreign market. I don't know if you've heard of a website called th