Thank you.

Madam Chair, members of the committee and distinguished guests, good afternoon.

I will give my remarks in English, but I invite you to speak to me in the official language of your choice.

I am speaking to you today from the unceded traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people, who have been here for millennia. Their culture and presence continue to nurture this land that we all benefit from and enjoy.

I am Nathalie Bradbury, president of the Organization of Women in International Trade, Ottawa chapter. OWIT Ottawa is a Canadian independent, non-profit corporation established in 2010 and run by volunteers. OWIT Toronto was established in 1999.

We are part of a growing international association of about 30 chapters worldwide and expanding steadily, with another dozen in the works around the world, thus demonstrating the continually growing recognition of the importance of women's participation in trade globally.

OWIT Ottawa members are trade professionals. They work in corporate finance, trade law, cross-border tax, defence procurement, freight forwarding, the foreign service and other areas. OWIT supports women entrepreneurs by facilitating trade through skills development and working with our partner organizations, such as the Forum for International Trade Training, an ISO-certified Canadian organization that provides professional trade certification worldwide.

OWIT also aims to contribute to trade policy development by conveying the concerns of women entrepreneurs to all levels of government, and also to the World Trade Organization, UNCTAD, the International Trade Centre and others.

OWIT Toronto also works with the Trade Facilitation Office of Canada, which helps SMEs from developing countries export to Canada. FITT and TFOC also partner with OWIT at the international level and provide services throughout their OWIT chapters overseas. We collaborate with local businesses, through Invest Ottawa and SheBoot, providing their members with insights, knowledge and guidance on international trade. We act as a bit of an international division or international conduit, to help them understand the difficulties of international trade.

We are grateful to be making our third appearance before this committee, and I want to take the opportunity to talk to you about what our members are saying about the important issue of trade and gender. The first time we spoke to your committee was in 2017, I believe, with the renewal of NAFTA.

I want to begin by recognizing and thanking the government for the WES and the groundbreaking policies, programs and funding it has provided. Annual share from the WEKH, the World Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub, has already been mentioned, so I won't go into that. EDC also notes that women-owned businesses contribute more than $117 billion to Canada's economy. These are great indicators of progress.

We look forward to seeing the evaluation of the WES, so that direct results can be identified and next steps recommended. We also recognize that Canada has been a world leader in advancing women's interests through trade agreements, and we hope this will continue.

Since 2017, Canada has been advancing trade and gender chapters and bringing inclusivity more broadly throughout the trade agreements. Progress at the bilateral level, such as the Canada-Chile FTA and CETA with the EU, can often go further than at the WTO, but both tracks are needed to build awareness and to make progress internationally.

OWIT also acknowledges that the trade advisory services, the CanExport program and trade missions organized by the TCS, and the financial services offered by EDC have had positive outcomes for women exporters.

The whole-of-government approach to enabling women to become full participants in the economy of trade has been truly foundational. Several witnesses have already touched upon important domestic issues, so I will be focusing more specifically on trade issues.

The first important point I would like to make is that trade is complicated, and it's difficult. Professionals spend their whole careers working in trade fields such as those I mentioned earlier. Plus, there's a whole army of specialists working strictly on the chapters and non-conforming measures. We're talking about tariff lines, HS codes, TRQs, rules of origin, trade and services, SPS, TBT—the list goes on and on. It is no wonder business people are surprised when they look to trade internationally.

We recommend that new exporters look first to building connections with trade experts, such as with OWIT in Canada and our chapters overseas—some of our colleagues in the organizations that have presented have some knowledge—but also that they reach out to the government services that are there to help them on their journey.

I would like to highlight a few successful women exporters.