International Trade committee  Well, human capital is a big issue now. We all know what's getting played out in the media with the temporary foreign workers. In the ICT sector today, we are running between 2% and 3% unemployment, which means we can't find people to fill the jobs. There are two ways to fill i

International Trade committee  Yes, goods and people. Tariff has very little impact for the ICT sector. There are some component pieces that would get tariff and the range is probably between 7 and 20. None of our members really have a major issue with the tariff items.

International Trade committee  Absolutely. Again, to some of the other comments made, the staff on the ground is critical to connecting them. In any country, and take India or China, for example, as a market, it doesn't really matter, any of the Asian countries, it's tough to do business there. It's a lot ea

International Trade committee  I think there are two pieces here. One is the talent for the companies themselves to continue to produce and expand, the talent internally within Canada. There are really limited resources to push kids at a younger age in high school more towards STEM programs, science and math,

International Trade committee  That's a very good question. Let me frame the problem to exactly where we see the problem in our sector. If you take a company at a start-up level, what I call the incubation level, there is really no funding problem. Friends and family can fund them to get the product to pre-c

International Trade committee  Those are long questions, and I'll try to cover them all off very quickly. The GMAP, the document we have seen, I will call the framework. It has the right framework with the elements that we from the ICT sector support. Now the executional side becomes very important. Do we hav

Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and honourable members. Thank you very much for having ITAC at this session. Just to introduce ourselves, ITAC represents the technology sector of the country. With over 300 companies, we produce about $160 billion in revenue and one million jobs. Most impo

Industry committee  Yes. I think one of the things we're finding in our sector is that the industry is getting more involved with academia to design what's needed. We are involved in a process of developing a national occupational survey as to what type of skill set young people should have going i

Industry committee  Thank you for the question. I think if you look at the Canadian ecosystem from an information technology lens, if you use that lens to look at it, there is no shortage of innovators or entrepreneurs starting in business. Where we get into some issues as a Canadian sector is that

Industry committee  I think the rural and remote broadband would be important to drive the innovation culture. In a technology sector, people don't go to jobs; jobs go to people. We need to get to the people where they are. In a Canadian context, where most of our population is urban, around the c

Industry committee  Thank you for the question. I'll kick it off this way. I think it really needs to start at a very early stage at the school level. I recognize the difference in terms of the provincial versus federal jurisdiction issue on education. But that aside, I think a national strategy is

Industry committee  I think first we need to understand what the situation is today in the Canadian market. In the Canadian market, most of the time you see that small and medium-sized businesses are not using online tools as much as they should in order to grow. That is a statement of fact. If you

Industry committee  It will be a living document. You'll see the first one probably within the next couple of weeks. It will be mostly around a call to action on what the issues are and what needs to happen. Then we'll probably convene some of the experts to put together some of the major issues we

Industry committee  Intellectual property is the most valuable asset the company would have. We need to have an IP regime that is not only on par with the global scale but in fact better. You can look at any small Canadian company, and I'll use myself as an example. I used to be CEO of Certicom. I h

Industry committee  I'll give you two specific examples. One is that I think our intellectual property regime needs to be a lot more nimble and faster for the Canadian companies to process. Second, one of the comments we put forward in our budget submission was that if I was a small business and I g