International Trade committee  Through you, Mr. Chair, I'll speak to what needs to happen, if that makes sense, and what isn't really happening yet, and I will keep this, again, in the context of small and medium manufacturers. A lot of the problems we've gotten into in the first place come from—and this is not to denigrate our manufacturing community at all—a lack of executional knowledge.

International Trade committee  Through you, Madam Chair, there's a lot in that question to unpack. I will try, as quickly as I can, to reiterate.... What caused the failures? There were several things. Beginning in the late nineties we had a lot going on. It got worse with.... I'd say we were at our peak in the late nineties.

International Trade committee  This is why I say, “reindustrialize.” When we talk about supply chain, we talk about trade, exporting, purchasing and manufacturing. These things on their own are no more a supply chain than a set of tires is a car. Isn't that right? They're components of the supply chain, but when we're talking about the supply chain we need to talk about the whole system.

International Trade committee  Again, I'm going to speak purely from the manufacturing perspective because that's the background I'm involved in. I think we simply need more investment in productivity. When we talk about the supply chain, export and export development, and increasing trade—any of these things—what we're ultimately talking about is productivity.

International Trade committee  Sure, Madam Chair, through you, regardless of whether our future is a green economy or not, infrastructure is going to be a critical piece of it. Meeting the needs we're going to have for green energy, for solar panels and for EV production, requires not just having the resources of minerals but also the extraction and processing of the minerals on a scale that we haven't seen before.

International Trade committee  Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for the privilege to speak to you today. My name is Matt Weller. I am the founder of Naviga Supply Chain, which was created to respond to the supply chain challenges of small and medium manufacturers, which make up 99.4% of all of Canada's manufacturing.