Maybe I'll start there and then work back to your other questions.

It's precisely why I have the portfolio of small business and export promotion. I put a bit of an emphasis on promotion.

In the three and a half months that I've been minister, I've met with about 1,200 small and medium-sized companies across the country. I know all of my colleagues, and all of my parliamentary colleagues, have met businesses. You're quite right. There is work that we need to do in order to do a better job at providing information to our SMEs so that they understand the various programs and services the government has available to them.

I talked a little earlier about Innovation Canada.

Innovation Canada is our effort and it's phenomenal, because in about two minutes, as an individual business owner or an entrepreneur, you can go in and answer a number of questions about your company: Are you a small business? How many employees do you have? What are you looking for? Are you looking for talent, export resources and advice or are you looking for networks?

There's a series of questions, but the point is recognizing that small and medium-sized businesses need to know about the programs we have, along with programs offered in other jurisdictions, know where to get them and have an ease of use.

In that period of time, it's been up for about eight months—off the top of my head, and the officials can give me the exact number—over 150,000 unique businesses have entered into that portal. The whole point about that is, as you said, if we have these great programs how do we make sure that Canadian SMEs know that they exist for them? How do they access it, and when do they access it, is it easy for them to use?

We've certainly put that in place solely with the objective of letting them know about the programs, services and resources available at the different levels of government—not only federally—and making a tool that is easy for them to use. In two minutes, you're going to get a very tailored set of supports or answers to the questions you're looking for.

Transcript

Discussions (0)