International Trade committee  We've used them in the past. The challenge comes when you go into a niche market. They probably won't have the expertise for that because of the capacity they have to cover. They won't have a lot of experience or a lot of ability in small markets. In the bigger markets, they will

International Trade committee  No, the wheels fell off that particular program, sadly, for all sorts of reasons. The challenge is a big challenge. To generate the potential that is latent in the marketplace, you need to engage people who are practitioners rather than, with all due respect, the theoretical on

International Trade committee  I'll tell you a sad fact. I bank in the States. They say, where we live, you can tell the Canadians, because they have a gallon of milk under one arm, a turkey under the other arm, and they smell like gasoline—

International Trade committee  —because everyone goes across the river to get [Inaudible—Editor] in Sault Ste. Marie. I bank across the river, because doing business with the Canadian banks was impossible. I mean it was incredibly difficult, not impossible. I was fighting with a Canadian bank—a couple of them

International Trade committee  No. They all, or 90% of them, went into exporting businesses, but not locally. Some went overseas and some went to other parts of Canada.

International Trade committee  No. It was a bit of a variable, because the school asked me to teach it but it didn't have any structure. We actually just sat around. We went through a textbook they gave us, but we tended to study more on the practical experience side. We didn't do anything overly structured.

International Trade committee  That's right. We ended up with that group, with about 10 or 12 in the class, because the majority of them were fascinated by exporting. They wanted to stay involved, but there was nothing local to do there, practically speaking. So we set up this organization where we provided th

International Trade committee  I haven't looked at anything.

International Trade committee  I have a couple of things, actually. I'll go back to your first point about the confusion. In the sales business, the challenge is not what you say, but what people hear. The other challenge is that people buy benefits, not features. We have the tendency to list the features an

International Trade committee  There are all sorts of things, various ones. I think the challenge, in many ways, is qualifying the entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurialism is the fundamental, let's say, the foundational bit, but they also have to be culturally relevant. They have to be innovative. They have to be a l

International Trade committee  The challenge is that, with all due respect to widget makers, they have a lovely product and they want to move it, to do something with it. The first step is something that's going to cost them a lot of money, and so they spend a lot of money on that and then they say, “Well, I n

International Trade committee  It's critical. We're having trouble. Ontario may fall out of the soybean business to Europe because of costs. Europe is becoming a bit more protectionist, and so they are trying to buy their products in Europe. They can buy in local currency. The shipping is a lot easier. Whereas

International Trade committee  The challenge is that they are the domain of larger businesses, typically, and the energy that I think is latent in Canada's economy is in small and medium-sized entities that are involved in more niche markets. I can't compete with the Cargills, ADMs and Bunges of the world—I ca

International Trade committee  Yes, I think the challenge is that we can encourage companies to get involved in exporting, but we also need to enable them to get into exporting, and that's the next step. I think sometimes the wheels have fallen off in the past because we encourage them, and the trouble is we g

International Trade committee  Red lentils, for example.