International Trade committee  I hope so, I think is the answer. Certainly going paperless can often be an advantage, but it can also not necessarily change much. If you're just transferring what was on paper onto a screen, and you're still having to pull the data, and you still have to figure out how to get

International Trade committee  I am asked that question a lot, and there's not an easy answer because they are so disparate across the country. They are all focused on different things. When you're running your business, you're really just focused on running your business. Similar to what I think my colleague

International Trade committee  I didn't say that.

International Trade committee  Including a chapter is a big start, because that never was the case before, and expanding what's already in that chapter. Right now, actually nothing is binding in that particular chapter. Maybe making parts of it more binding as there is an obligation on the countries that are s

International Trade committee  In terms of border flow as well as the whole process you have to go through in order to get a product across the border, I think we could look at ways to be more efficient around that. Right now you have things like HS classifications. If you continually import the same thing all

International Trade committee  Yes. The small business chapter in this agreement is very important. It's only the second or third agreement now. The small business chapter first appeared in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, and this one has adopted it at this scale. The reason it's important is that it

International Trade committee  That would be good.

International Trade committee  It's unlikely they're aware that there's a small business chapter; however, we're doing what we can in surveys to make them aware of the fact that there is a small business chapter and, more importantly, what that actually means. That's the key. It doesn't really matter if there

International Trade committee  Organizations like EDC and the trade commissioner service for that matter are not well known either among small companies. In fact, when they do learn about them, they often feel like they're not really meant for them and that they're meant for bigger companies. We're constantly

International Trade committee  Yes, and simplifying the processes.

International Trade committee  Yes, and that's part of the reason we're a bit worried about the impact this is going to have. Canada Post is the one that's the real problem. It has never been the couriers. I think that the couriers have always done a fairly good job of collecting duties and taxes, even under t

International Trade committee  Thank you for the opportunity to be here today to share the perspectives of small and medium-sized companies on the trade agreement between Canada, the United States and Mexico. I'll be sharing my time with Jasmin Guénette, my colleague. He'll be starting off, and I will be end

International Trade committee  Thank you, Jasmin. We'll get into our priorities and recommendations. I want to say, first and foremost, that we encourage the government to move forward on ratifying this agreement as soon as possible. We have experienced a lot of uncertainty in international trade over the pas

Industry committee  It's funny, because to prepare for this.... CFIB has a counselling service and counsellors across the country respond to inquiries from our members. We do about 36,000 calls a year, and inquiries regarding the CRA account for probably one in every four of those calls. I had my co

Industry committee  I was going to say that one of the things we have found where regulatory modernization has been the most effective is political leadership. If the political leadership writes into the mandate of the officials that they must do this and then keeps them to it, that is the most ef