International Trade committee  I want to make sure that whatever program you have is equitable for all different folks. I don't want to see one picking the winners or losers. I want everybody to be able to access it. When I look on my street—and our plant is in a very industrial area—there's a lot of great tec

International Trade committee  My concern is that some of the people see success and then they get out of Dodge. We're taking our best and brightest and they are going where they will have a more competitive landscape. Taking it back to having a competitive landscape is fundamental to be able to compete, sca

International Trade committee  One of our members brought in a new piece of equipment, and it sat on their shop floor for 18 months. They were trying to get approval. If you know that it's going to be painful to bring it in, there is no incentive to do it. We need to be able to streamline new equipment, especi

International Trade committee  Putting in new equipment or expanding your current footprint is a nightmare. It's such a nightmare that people don't even want to do it in terms of any kind of new equipment or if they want to expand on their current footprint. It's the steps that you have to go through. For equi

International Trade committee  I think if you're going to be hiring new people, you need to hire people who are not diplomats. You need to hire salespeople, people who can go in and get you an appointment with whoever you want to target in a foreign market. I don't know if you've heard of a website called th

International Trade committee  There's nowhere to train them, so we need to get on that skills gap. It's an easy and not expensive fix to do, I would argue, but a lot of our colleges have also decided that they want to be universities, so again, we don't have skilled labour coming out of the college system.

International Trade committee  Can I just comment on that? We have an aging workforce, especially in the skilled labour pool. If you go out to our plant and look at our people, you see amazingly talented people, but they're getting close to retirement. We have taken all the trades out of the public high school

International Trade committee  I will just talk about some of the companies in my area that are coalition members. There's this great Indian baked goods company called Surati. If you ever want the best pistachio cookie made right here in Canada, that's the place to go. They were going to expand into a building

International Trade committee  Thank you for inviting me to speak today. I'm not a lobbyist. I'm a business owner. We have a small company in Scarborough. It was started off by my father-in-law as a washing machine repair company, and it's grown to 92 people. We have over four patents for new technology devel

International Trade committee  I don't. I spoke from my heart.

Natural Resources committee  We—

Natural Resources committee  We do not have a.... We believe efficiency will reduce our costs and will reduce greenhouse gases and—

Natural Resources committee  We want to do our part, and we have done our part. In fact, manufacturing has driven greenhouse gases down 30.9%—

Natural Resources committee  Absolutely.

Natural Resources committee  Nothing could be more untrue and completely offensive, because small and medium-sized businesses are the lifeblood of the economy. We are the ones who keep people employed and get people to pay taxes to give to politicians so they can do the program. If you don't have us, you don