International Trade committee  Thank you for the privilege of coming to talk. My apologies for my outfit. Air Canada is protecting my blue suit, white shirt and blue tie incredibly well. In fact, they're in a secret location and no one really knows where they are, so we have to put up with my current Air Cana

International Trade committee  That's right. It's casual day. Thanks again for allowing me to come. I'm new to this environment. It's very different for me. I thought maybe for the five minutes allotted I'd give a brief background of my history in exporting, to provide some context and perspective and also ma

International Trade committee  It's a long story, again a very fascinating one, but maybe not for this platform. The challenge is there are some marketplaces that have a shelf life over here, but there are other ones that need to go elsewhere. This particular case was doing some consulting for locals, a ma

International Trade committee  Yes, we built a relationship with the guy we were working with shipping certified organic grains to Europe, and he said that that someone had called him. They were looking for someone in Canada to work with, and he said, “You have to work with this guy because he does business di

International Trade committee  In those places you have to be very careful. That's where trade commissions are great and come in really well. They help you understand the culture in a different country.

International Trade committee  Yes, I think the challenge is that we can encourage companies to get involved in exporting, but we also need to enable them to get into exporting, and that's the next step. I think sometimes the wheels have fallen off in the past because we encourage them, and the trouble is we g

International Trade committee  Red lentils, for example.

International Trade committee  The challenge in the agricultural sector is there are multiple layers, and the farmers are going to grow it for them, but they're not going to export it. Typically, you need something that's called an elevator—it's a distribution hub in reverse—and they're going to take the stuff

International Trade committee  The challenge is that they are the domain of larger businesses, typically, and the energy that I think is latent in Canada's economy is in small and medium-sized entities that are involved in more niche markets. I can't compete with the Cargills, ADMs and Bunges of the world—I ca

International Trade committee  There are all sorts of things, various ones. I think the challenge, in many ways, is qualifying the entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurialism is the fundamental, let's say, the foundational bit, but they also have to be culturally relevant. They have to be innovative. They have to be a l

International Trade committee  The challenge is that, with all due respect to widget makers, they have a lovely product and they want to move it, to do something with it. The first step is something that's going to cost them a lot of money, and so they spend a lot of money on that and then they say, “Well, I n

International Trade committee  It's critical. We're having trouble. Ontario may fall out of the soybean business to Europe because of costs. Europe is becoming a bit more protectionist, and so they are trying to buy their products in Europe. They can buy in local currency. The shipping is a lot easier. Whereas

International Trade committee  I haven't looked at anything.

International Trade committee  I have a couple of things, actually. I'll go back to your first point about the confusion. In the sales business, the challenge is not what you say, but what people hear. The other challenge is that people buy benefits, not features. We have the tendency to list the features an

International Trade committee  No. They all, or 90% of them, went into exporting businesses, but not locally. Some went overseas and some went to other parts of Canada.