Canadian Heritage committee  I haven't.

Canadian Heritage committee  Let me give an example. Let's say, Mr. Hillyer, that you want to do an event in a hotel and you really aren't too sure what to do. You've never dealt with a hotel before. We will walk you through all of the various steps. I don't want to be disrespectful, as I said before, but re

Canadian Heritage committee  That said, in a hotel, you have banquet managers, sales managers, and sales teams, and we generate revenue by asking if you would like to have a meal served. You say, “Oh, very good, thank you very much.” We ask if you would like to have entertainment, which we can arrange. You s

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Simms. From a hotel point of view—and I'm not trying to be disrespectful at all when I say this—we go to the guest or the client when they approach us, and so long as what they are asking for is legal and moral and we've agreed upon a budget, then we wil

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'm delighted to be here. I was delighted to receive the invitation last week to come here. I look around the room and I see a lot of my old friends, including Gord Brown, who is a hotelier as well as a member of Parliament. Maybe we should p

Canadian Heritage committee  I'm completely apolitical. I do this for a living. Again, thank you, Mr. Chairman and all members of the committee. It's an honour and a privilege to be here with you today to talk about national protocol issues. At the outset, I'd like to say that hotels have extensive knowled

Finance committee  We appreciate what the government has done with the freezing of the EI premiums. The question that Mr. Brison had asked me was, would I be in favour of having that continue in the future? I said yes. But we recognize fully what the government has done in that area with the freezi

Finance committee  I think we would definitely respond positively to that, Mr. Brison, and in fact I think most other sectors would as well. We've seen over the course of the last two or three years the great reductions in numbers of people working in sectors right across the board. We lost about 1

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for the invitation to appear here today. Ladies and gentlemen, travel and tourism in Canada is a $74 billion industry. We employ about 594,000 people. In the lodging sector, last year we generated in excess of about $16 billion. W