Industry committee  Thank you so much for your question. Just as I answered in the last question, I think we just have to make it easier, a one-stop shop, for small businesses to meet the regulatory and compliance requirements. Is it fair for a small business owner to really understand the complexi

Industry committee  That's a very interesting question, because we have to first understand what type of data is generated by these businesses. Let's look at a business as a whole. Most of us might think of social media or we might think of online sales, but it's a lot more than that. You have empl

Industry committee  Think about the red tape and the complexities that small business owners have to go through. Let's just take an independent farm. I was surprised to know that there are over 1,000 registered independent farms in the Ottawa region alone. These farms produce products. They might, f

Industry committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, and committee members. Thank you for inviting me to share my thoughts. My name is Ritesh Kotak, and my work is focused on cybersecurity, privacy and digital transformation. I hold an MBA and recently completed my JD wherein I had the privilege to inter

Industry committee  Yes. At the end of the day, anything that would make it easier for small businesses—to me, they are the backbone of our economy and where we're seeing a lot of innovation—and cheaper and that would reduce the red tape would be of great benefit to small businesses. But in order to

Industry committee  From my personal experience, I truly believe that regulation is good. It protects Canadians. It tells us what we can and can't do. But at the same time, we need to make it easier. We need to make it more accessible. Let me give you an example. If you're a small business trying

Industry committee  Absolutely. Thank you for your question. First of all, connectivity is going to be absolutely essential. If you're not connected and if you don't have access to high-speed Internet, there's not much you can do to participate in the new digital economy or the hybrid economy, for

Industry committee  I'll be brief in my remarks. I'll use the example of a small flower shop. The flower shop, because of COVID, has been forced to essentially rethink how they're going to do business so they've gone online. That's opened up a lot of opportunities but also challenges. Consider, for

Industry committee  One of the ways the government can help—I'm a big advocate of red tape reduction and amalgamating different resources—is that if there were a tool kit, a single source that a small business or any business could go to, it would have access to information related to export, to tec

Industry committee  Absolutely, and thank you for your question. What's happened here with e-commerce and the pandemic is that a lot of businesses have moved to online platforms. Traditionally, we had these brick and mortar locations and we've gone online to do sales channels, but they are not sepa

Industry committee  Good morning, Madam Chair. I would like to start by thanking the committee for inviting me to share my thoughts on how Canada could become more competitive. My name is Ritesh Kotak, and I work with organizations to help them transform their operations digitally. I've studied a