Industry committee  Not to be too flippant about it, but certainly cash is king, and businesses need to have a cash flow to pay to pay payroll, their suppliers, the taxman and the landlord, so the more you have inflationary pressures, the more you see those input costs go up. It means that there is

Industry committee  Again, not to be too tongue-in-cheek about it, I feel we have a loss of direction at the moment, to be frank. We have this Canada free trade agreement that doesn't seem to be going anywhere fast. A litany of exemptions exist in there. I know, Mrs. Gray, that you previously helpe

Industry committee  At the risk of having a caricature of what the business community is like, profit is not a bad problem in itself. I think it's worth stating the obvious in that regard. The point about inflation particularly is that if you look at what is driving the inflationary pressures righ

Industry committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and honourable members. It's a pleasure to be here as part of the committee’s comprehensive study on small and medium-sized enterprise issues. I'll split my time, as the chair identified, with my colleague Alla, who is joining me virtually as well. I

International Trade committee  Yes and no. I think there are certain sectors that are well positioned. If you look at, for instance, our agriculture exporters, we have a great comparative advantage here. The one area, though, where I think we have a lot of work to do is in the energy sector. Mr. Arya referenc

International Trade committee  I don't think any of our supply-managed sectors have expressed an interest in those markets. I stand to be corrected on that, but certainly I would anticipate that the government is going to be taking a fairly traditional approach to minimizing concessions, if any, in supply-mana

International Trade committee  I think it's important to have those agreements. The more of these we have, the more embedded into international trade law the digital trade provisions are. There are two that I'll cite specifically. One is cross-border data flows, ensuring that if a company's going to operate

International Trade committee  I don't have the economic analysis at hand. I think, certainly, there will be sectors that face competitive pressures from lower tariffs on goods that would be coming into Canada, absolutely.

International Trade committee  One thing that we always say about trade agreements is that it's not just the tariff rates that influence the decisions that companies make. Companies will look at a whole host of factors: the tax policy domestically, the regulatory policy, the access to labour. What's important

International Trade committee  If I could ask the member for clarification, when you said “traceability”, it may have been lost in the interpretation. Are you talking about rules of origin, or are you talking about supply chain transparency?

International Trade committee  This is, I think, an interesting area of trade policy. It's one that we hear about, from our members, as being very difficult to actually do in practice with the due diligence that a number of civil society groups are seeking for companies to implement. The reality is that a lot

International Trade committee  Yes, and if I can localize it to the southwestern Ontario region, certainly state-owned—or if I can say, heavily state-backed—steel producers are a major concern we have. As much as our steel companies have the ability and the desire to compete, they can't do it against some of

International Trade committee  There are a couple of different things that come to mind there. First, of course, a lot of this is going to be done, if at all, at a multilateral level. The question is what leverage we have in a bilateral negotiation. One big challenge, I think, in the context of distortive ind

International Trade committee  I'll go into highly speculative mode here, but I think part of it is because of the pandemic. Certainly, the inability to do face-to-face interaction slows down a whole lot of things. Trade agreements aren't immune to that either. The other thing I would say about ASEAN, though,

International Trade committee  Thank you very much, Chair, for having me back. I think this is certainly a timely study, given the government's work currently on the Indo-Pacific strategy, upon which I'm going to be focusing my remarks for the next few minutes. The first area that I want to mention is aroun