Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I wish you all a good afternoon. It's my pleasure to be here on behalf of Canada's 90,000 manufacturers and exporters and our association's 2,500 direct members to discuss the state of Canada's small and medium-sized enterprises. The manufacturing indust

Industry committee  Yes, in general terms, the incentives—and I'll pick one—could be through the tax code. That would probably be the most helpful. There's a whole suite of programs that currently exist. Most of them focus on the big companies, so it's very challenging for an SME to sort of find a h

Industry committee  I'm going to speak English so I can answer your question more effectively. The government is doing all it can on the buy America front. The challenge is that as the smaller country and the smaller economy, it's very hard to negotiate with a larger partner that holds all the card

Industry committee  Yes, the crisis of labour shortages in manufacturing is very acute, particularly in Quebec. We have 80,000 vacancies in our industry right now and we're one of the highest-paying industries out there. This is a problem we need to fix. We think we can do it through immigration, bu

Industry committee  The temporary foreign worker program is being relied on a lot more out of necessity by manufacturers, because there's simply no other recourse to get the workers they need. On that front, sure, there's always streamlining that needs to be done to the program. They're currently tr

Industry committee  I think they're playing it right now. What I mentioned in my remarks was the unique problem SME manufacturers are having when it comes to accessing components key to their processes. When they talk to us about these problems, it's that they can't get the components, they can't

Industry committee  We understand very well that the program, for political reasons and rightly so, does not want to displace Canadian workers who can fill these jobs, but then we look at it as an association and as an industry that sees 80,000 vacancies—30,000 plus in Quebec—and we say, “Why are we

Industry committee  Obviously, manufacturers are feeling the pinch from the sanctions. It's not that they don't support them. They do. We understand the global crisis we're in and the immoral actions of one country, Russia, in all of this. For the most part, manufacturers support the sanctions, but

Industry committee  Absolutely. You know the system very well. In terms of the manufacturing of automobiles, it makes no sense to us. As I mentioned earlier, we don't really trade with the U.S. anymore. We produce stuff together, and it does cross the border a number of times. In our messaging, we

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to be here on behalf of Canada's 90,000 manufacturers and exporters and our association's 2,500 direct members to discuss Bill C-19. The manufacturing industry is 10% of Canada's GDP, produces two-thirds of Canad

Finance committee  It's certainly not good. To echo everything that Ms. Anghel said, it's for those same reasons. She's looking at the marine sector, and we have members there. However, it will impact the aerospace and automotive sectors and all of the supply chain partners that are part of that. T

Finance committee  I'm happy to answer that question. We were very pleased to see the creation of those programs. We're still awaiting a lot of the details of how they'll be structured and what they'll look like, but at first glance, it's something that we called for, so we're certainly very happ

Finance committee  We've done a lot of work over the past few years on this, so I would be more than happy to share that research and those policy recommendations with the committee. Perhaps we can connect offline afterward. At a high level, what I mentioned before was the SME piece. That's import

Finance committee  I agree that it is. As an anecdote, at the association level, whenever we hear from our members that it's the worst is whenever we have blockades or transportation network disruptions. It affects them the most, and certainly manufacturers are the biggest users of Canada's trans

Finance committee  That's part of it. What we're noticing, at least from the government, is.... We're starting to piece together our incentives and plans, and there are various elements to that. That is one of them. Our general feeling at this point is that they're all introductory moves, first ste