Industry committee  I can say that the U.S. is the world's largest trader in services. In the numbers we've recorded--and it depends on how you look at it--basically 12% to 15% of our total exports and imports are service-related. In the U.S. it's more like one-third, if I remember correctly. They'r

Industry committee  Broadly speaking, if you look at the unemployment rate, which is kind of your best basic measure of the labour force tightness, we expect the unemployment rate to continue to rise through the early part of next year, but it will quickly fall thereafter. Part of that comes from jo

Industry committee  Basically, if you talk about high-skilled workers, more often it is a problem of supply and demand. Just to use the Quebec example, we have done some work with Bell and CGI in Quebec, looking at IT workers. After the tech bust, at the beginning of this decade, we saw a large decl

Industry committee  I don't have all the figures in front of me, but to my knowledge the most export-intensive part is the transportation sector. If I remember correctly, about 15% of its revenues come from exports. Other segments can be lower. Financial services, if I remember correctly, are at abo

Industry committee  Basically, I would just say, broadly speaking, that much of the problem with this recession, or the source of the cause of the recession, was imported into Canada. Because the services sector is much more domestically oriented, it's one of the key reasons that it's been less affe

Industry committee  I'd have to double-check the numbers, but it is definitely one of the biggest. If you combine federal, provincial, municipal, education, and health, then yes, that combined would definitely be the biggest part of the services sector.

Industry committee  Thank you again for having me here as well. For anyone who is unaware, the Conference Board of Canada is a non-profit, non-partisan think tank based here in Ottawa. We do research in a variety of areas, including economic policy, public policy, and education and learning. When I

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  Certainly SMIs don't have the same infrastructure internally to help them in terms of identifying markets and companies in these foreign markets. You see in the SMI data that they're much less trade-intensive than average, and I think that's a key reason for it. They tend to work

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  Our view is that it's essentially a short-term phenomenon. Oil prices will rise from their current levels. The fundamentally tight global supply-and-demand conditions that existed prior to the current global recession will return. We may not see $150 oil again any time soon, but

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  A few years ago we went through the exercise of going through Canada's industries, industry by industry, comparing our productivity with that of the U.S., and, as Jayson said, in a number of industries we were actually more productive than were our peers in the United States. Th

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  Obviously, the U.S. is our largest trading partner, so it's definitely good news, although I would say most of the low-hanging fruit that came as a result of NAFTA has been picked. We haven't really seen a big improvement or big increase in our trading relationship with the Unite

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  In the very short term, I don't think it's unrealistic to say there may be more shutdowns, because the industry is still going through the process of trying to rebalance. On the wood side of things, they're trying to go through the process of balancing production with the level o

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  I think so. I think there's certainly a role for our various agencies, whether it's BDC or Industry Canada or other organizations in the federal government, to learn from these best practices and try to apply them to our situation. Essentially, if the private sector to this point

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  We produce an annual report card on how Canada performs, and innovation is one of the things we measure as part of that. I don't know the exact number, but generally we don't rank very well by most measures. It's a quantitative-based thing, looking at things like patents and the

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  It's an interesting question. I'm not sure if I have a specific prescription for that problem. Essentially, it's about our attitude toward risk in terms of our financial institutions and also the maturity of our things like private equity, these sorts of things. I think, at lea