Industry committee  Generally speaking, there's not a shortage of capital. We do have an active and effective small cap equity market in Canada, the Venture Exchange, which is successful compared with what you see in many other countries. Venture capital is less available here than in countries like

Industry committee  You talked about all the different programs that are in place. I think one of the biggest things would be to start assessing the effectiveness of those programs. There are a lot of programs, and some of them are very effective. I think we need to start having better practices a

Industry committee  Different programs have different objectives, so it would have to be based on a particular program's objectives. If you talk about, for example, accelerators or those sorts of things, the questions would be how many businesses have you started, how much have they grown, and how m

Industry committee  It's very hard to pick winners, but we certainly have core strengths—photonics, and pharmaceuticals was mentioned by Scott. There is a variety of areas in which we have key strengths. Even in less technology-driven industries, it's still possible to have success by thinking about

Industry committee  Scott mentioned our innovation measures earlier. Canada scores very well globally in terms of the ability to start up a new business; it's one of the best in the world. There are many, literally thousands, of new manufacturers who start a business in Canada every year. It's not

Industry committee  To continue what I was saying about our other success stories, we have a variety of industries where production may now be lower today than it was at its peak, but we've seen strong growth coming out of the recession in things like wood products, chemicals, plastics, electronics,

Industry committee  My name is Michael Burt. I'm with the Conference Board of Canada. For anyone who is unaware, we're a non-profit, non-partisan research institute based here in Ottawa. We do research in a variety of areas, including public policy and economic forecasting and analysis. You invited

Natural Resources committee  Looking just at refineries, that's a fairly small industry. It only directly employs a few thousand people across the country, whereas the oil and gas sector employs closer to 100,000 people. That's one reason why, when I was answering questions earlier, I thought it was very nar

Natural Resources committee  Vis-à-vis offshore...?

Natural Resources committee  I understand what you're saying. I can definitely tell you that the dollar value of what we import from other countries is larger than the interprovincial imports. If you add in what's occurring inside Alberta, it's probably bigger domestically than the—

Natural Resources committee  Even the U.S. number that you quote is based on some assumptions, because the way the model works is based on dollar flows rather than employment. It makes assumptions around how that translates into jobs in the U.S. So it is very hard to say.

Natural Resources committee  No, unfortunately.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, there's no doubt that we could expand domestic supply chains. We've done work with the companies in Alberta. Quite often they look overseas before they look to Ontario or Quebec or wherever for their inputs.

Natural Resources committee  I don't have the BERD numbers in front of me. I assume that's what you are quoting. R and D tends to vary from industry to industry. If you look at pharmaceuticals, it's 10% of the revenues. For other industries it's a very tiny share. We can certainly look at whether they can

Natural Resources committee  The investment we're looking at here is investment in essentially equipment and things like drilling activity. We're not looking at the R and D activity.