Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think the main question I would frame for them, given today's discussion, is what they are doing from a technology point of view to provide control. At the end of the day, all of the things we talk about come down to the element of control at the user end

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the panellists for inviting us. ITAC represents the ICT sector. In our case we represent over 325 companies across Canada, and 80% of our members are what you call small and medium-sized businesses. With respect to the jobs, growth, and inn

Finance committee  Maybe I'll answer from two aspects. One is not having available structured funds. Most early-stage companies always have to go through family, friends, and then angels. It's a very difficult way to grow past the first stage. They continue to struggle and cannot scale. I can nam

Finance committee  That is correct.

Finance committee  Absolutely. If we cannot build companies of scale, we cannot compete globally.

Finance committee  I think it would. The impact is obviously there; you're right.

Finance committee  I don't think there is an exact number, but we know that the SR and ED changes that were made equalled about $300 million worth of funding being removed. If you take that and extrapolate it, particularly in a technology sector, it would be equal to somewhere between 1,800 and 2,0

Finance committee  Yes, or the equivalent of that: it is money being removed from the system. We're basically extracting funds out of the economy and haven't poured them back, so it has a direct impact on jobs.

Finance committee  Right now the plan has leverage to grow to $1 billion, including some private-sector funding. That is very good news. What we don't have is a sense of how it is going to be doled out by each of the sectors and regions; we're still waiting for that. The only way to make it work

Finance committee  I think it's a good question. In our submission when the announcement came out, we did go back to the proposal that's on the table from the Quebec government. Directionally, it has the right approaches. Whether or not the ratios and the numbers exactly need to be replicated, th

Finance committee  Okay. I think we agree with that, because we even asked the Ontario government, in our submission, to revisit exactly what's going on in the Quebec market on the venture side.

Finance committee  Yes, we do. In fact, over the last couple of days we did sign a MOU with Canada Health Infoway to start looking at certification of health software across the country, just because we have 14 jurisdictions and every jurisdiction's needs are different. We're trying to find a way t

Finance committee  It will impact both the patient side and the clinician side, because informatics covers the whole domain at this stage, so patient care will definitely get improved. If you have a better technology implemented in hospitals, the wait times obviously will go down. It is a big iss

International Trade committee  Thank you very much for inviting ITAC to this forum. We are pleased to submit our position on this issue. To frame the discussion, we represent the information technology companies in Canada. Our members are multinationals, but 75% of our members are SMEs across the country. The