Government Operations committee  Our membership is pretty much a reflection of the business population in Canada. It's every sector of the economy, every region of the country. They primarily get financing through debt financing, absolutely, and it would be everything from the one-person, self-employed consultan

Government Operations committee  It would be the little, more established companies, because generally, when you're starting out, you're not so focused on being part of a public policy organization, and once you become more established you are. Having said that, I'd say probably in any given year about 5% of our

Government Operations committee  Absolutely, or the other way around. They start with us when they're young, as RIM did. RIM was a member of ours up until 1998, when they went public, and they no longer could be a member because we don't represent publicly traded companies; we only represent privately owned Cana

Government Operations committee  We were actually given the R and D reviews output last week. We will be going back to our membership to find out a little more about their perceptions of what they're recommending. We are concerned, because when you start directing money toward specific companies again, you're

Government Operations committee  I think one of the key things is connecting more with business associations and other organizations that do have that touch with businesses that are going to be interested in procurement-type practices. I know they do some of that outreach already, but I think that's probably the

Government Operations committee  I think one of the eternal struggles is to understand what is the correct definition of a small or medium-sized business. At our organization we use 20 to 50 as small, 50 to 500 as medium, and 500 upwards as large. Then we have “under 20” as the micro-enterprise size. I think i

Government Operations committee  Yes.

Government Operations committee  Certainly when it comes to federal procurement, I think the issue we've been dealing with for years has been the paperwork associated with it. When I said earlier that if it takes you longer to actually apply for a contract than it takes to fulfill that contract, there's a proble

Government Operations committee  This has been something we've been hearing about quite a bit in the last couple of years in particular, that often we're finding small businesses are being rejected right off the start because they are not able to come in at the lowest cost. But what's not being factored into the

Government Operations committee  First of all, it's not very well known at all. I'm not sure whether it has a PR office, because only 5% or 6% of members are even aware that it exists. These are the people who are actually involved in federal government contracts. I think one of the reasons might be that it is n

Government Operations committee  I don't know where the translation was at, so I'll just go back to where I was. Finally, we would also suggest following the recommendation from the recently released report of the R and D review panel, namely, to consider not just a push approach to the project, where the firms

Government Operations committee  Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. CFIB is a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization representing more than 108,000 small and medium-sized businesses across Canada that collectively employ more than one and a quarter million Canadians and account for $7

Finance committee  We have members on both sides of that particular question, of course. We have members who are both under the threshold and over the threshold, so our members are going to be supportive of a general corporate tax rate. We do have concerns that the small business tax rate is erodin

Finance committee  I wonder if you could repeat the question because the translation wasn't very clear.

Finance committee  I don't know if I can answer that question the way you're expecting me to answer it, but I do think you need to give people opportunities to invest, and make sure those opportunities are of low cost and that they understand what needs to be done. I think when it comes to CPP and