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Results: 31 - 45 of 206
Liette Lamonde
View Liette Lamonde Profile
Liette Lamonde
2021-05-20 17:21
Thank you for your question, Mr. Ste-Marie.
I have a great example for you. The first unicorn in Quebec is Lightspeed, a company that makes us all very proud.
The founder of Lightspeed is from British Columbia. He moved to Quebec and decided to expand his company there. He had a hard time finding the necessary talent in his scale-up phase. He even had to recruit people from abroad to complete his management team. That's where the issue lies. When you don't have a scale-up platform, you don't have the talent at home, and you must go abroad to find it.
Through the scale-up platform, we want to help our start-up founders go abroad to find the missing talent, until we can create that talent at home.
As companies such as Lightspeed are created, this expertise is also created. Suddenly, we have people who can help other start-ups become scale-up companies and perhaps, who knows, unicorns.
This is a perfect example of the trickle-down effect of all the expertise and economic benefits that stem from a success story such as Lightspeed.
There are many other examples, and we're here to create even more.
View Gabriel Ste-Marie Profile
BQ (QC)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Minister, as you know, the greater Montreal area and other parts of Quebec are home to thousands of tech start-ups. At the beginning of the pandemic, they told us that the wage subsidy program was inadequate in terms of coverage. A start-up is, by definition, a business where someone puts up their own money while working towards a technological development, which, once ready, they can sell and reap the benefits of. The government turned to the innovation assistance program, administered by the National Research Council of Canada.
Now, some start-ups are asking why the program was not extended until September 25, like other income support programs. As we know, the innovation assistance program provides more than $250 million in funding, largely to start-ups. Some have even warned that, if the program ends, they could go bankrupt by the end of the pandemic.
Why end the innovation assistance program when we are this close to the goal line?
View Chrystia Freeland Profile
Lib. (ON)
Thank you for your question.
I must say, I certainly recognize how important Montreal's innovation ecosystem is. Toronto, where I'm from, has a similar ecosystem. Mr. Julian is here, and Vancouver, in his riding, has an ecosystem as well. The same is true of many other Canadian cities and municipalities.
Start-ups are a very important part of our growth plan. Canadian innovators will find quite a few measures in the budget that are meant to help them, especially small and medium-sized businesses wanting to make growth-oriented investments.
The budget truly focuses on growth and the future, with numerous programs that will be particularly helpful to these types of businesses. If you like, I can put together a list and send it to you.
View Pat Kelly Profile
CPC (AB)
Thank you.
When the minister appeared at committee to discuss the fall economic statement, she admitted there was nothing in the fall economic statement, or the Speech from the Throne, or any of the previous measures to assist small businesses that opened their doors in, say, late 2019 or the early months of 2020 and do not meet the criteria of the existing support measures.
Is there anything in this budget that would address this problem? This was something that has been widely acknowledged now by the government as a shortcoming in the support measures.
Evelyn Dancey
View Evelyn Dancey Profile
Evelyn Dancey
2021-05-11 17:41
I was pausing to see if my colleague, Mr. Marsland, wanted to reply as well, but perhaps we can share in our response if we have different things to say.
There are actually new or enhanced program announcements for Budget 2021 that will be available to new businesses or those that have been launched since the beginning of the pandemic.
With respect to my area at Finance of economic development, there is the Canada digital adoption program to support the acquisition of technology to help the digitization of business. There is the expansion of the Canada small business financing program, which includes a number of elements that are included in Bill C-30 for further detail, but both expands the range of assets that can be financed as well as the different types of financing available.
There also has been an expansion of the government's suite of entrepreneurship measures for women entrepreneurs, Black entrepreneurs, and other equity-deserving entrepreneurs.
View Pat Kelly Profile
CPC (AB)
For the entrepreneur who has spent all of their life savings in 2019 to build a new restaurant with an opening date of March 15, 2020, there's really....
With all due respect, I think many of the programs you've described, or some of them, will decline those businesses, and for the same reasons they don't qualify for all of the existing programs. Is there really anything for a business such as I've described?
View Pat Kelly Profile
CPC (AB)
All right.
The new hiring credit involves much of the same criteria as the wage subsidy and rent subsidy. As I mentioned in my second question, the requirement of a loss in revenue compared with early 2019, or a year-over-year loss, excludes many businesses, including new businesses. Was this a deliberate exclusion in the hiring program? Will new businesses be able to access this program? If not, why not?
Andrew Marsland
View Andrew Marsland Profile
Andrew Marsland
2021-05-11 17:45
It's correct that for the proposed hiring program one of the criteria is that the employer has suffered a revenue decline. That is correct. Essentially, the program is focused on recovery from the pandemic and provides an alternative calculation to the wage subsidy. The proposal is that it would not apply where there's no revenue decline as defined under the wage subsidy.
Hari Suthan Subramaniam
View Hari Suthan Subramaniam Profile
Hari Suthan Subramaniam
2021-05-10 11:27
Thank you so much, Madam Chair, members of the committee and my colleagues from industry. It's a great honour to be here to talk about how we may be able to take part and inform the discussion on Canada's export of environmental and clean technologies on goods and services.
I'll take a bit of a departure from my colleagues. I think I'm one of the only software companies to talk about software exports and what they mean.
My name is Hari Subramaniam, as Madam Chair has introduced me. I head up strategic growth and global sales for Opus One Solutions. We believe we are probably a good fit as a litmus test or a canary in the coal mine with respect to how we've been able to garner help from domestic support, from the government's policies and regulations, while at the same time we can give you a sense of the competitive landscape that we and other colleagues in the sector face.
As a quick snapshot, Opus One was Canadian-founded. We have two offices, Richmond Hill in Toronto and downtown Toronto. Hopefully, we will be moving out for more talent across the country. Opus One is one of the few companies that has been named four times to the top 100 clean-tech companies globally. We share that honour with CarbonCure in Nova Scotia.
We started to build our pilot technology in about 2016, really moving to commercialization in 2019-20. We have grown about 500% in employment, hitting well past about a hundred this year, and we've actually grown during COVID, or the global pandemic. That's the uniqueness of the sector that we're in. Overall on revenues we're at about 300% since about 2016, and we're one of the few leading companies from a software perspective to facilitate energy transition. Our customers tend to be utilities, whether they're privately owned or government-owned.
I should probably provide you with a sense of how we segment our customers and how we serve from Canada internationally.
One of our other unique attributes is that we've actually grown into about six to seven countries between 2020 and 2021. We've actually gone international and global during the global pandemic, and 90% of our staff are Canadian-based.
First, I'd love to thank the committee and the governments writ large for the policy framework and the funding associated that have really helped to drive-start our start-up nation, giving birth to companies like ours. We just happen to be in the clean-tech sector. One of the stats that I do not have, and I'm not sure if it's robustly there, is the split between hardware from clean tech; money that leaves us, whether it be renewable developers that are Canadian or are elsewhere; software; and then services in clean tech as an export quantity.
From a software perspective, I would think Canada is one of the biggest exporters of clean-technology software globally. How do we help that sector? That's probably why I'm here to share my thoughts.
I'll give a shout-out to a Canadian company that is a little less known, but pretty big here actually, called CGI out of Montreal. They're one of the largest clean-technology services firms globally. I think there's a lot of diamonds in the rough that perhaps through this process we can unearth.
I'll get to the two questions that, I think, were posed. One is, what is going well? I think we've built a great ecosystem for start-ups: the federal agencies, the incubators. We have a wonderful job done with the trade commissioners engaging in a meaningful but also a metric-driven manner to help Canadian companies export abroad. I think from ISED to SDTC to NRCan, they've done a fantastic job with IRAP in terms of how to construct funding or leveraging to help companies grow. I think EDC and BDC have done a good job from a venture cap perspective. I'll give credit to Diana Cartwright from the trade commission for really shaping that organization. We have definitely been blessed and have benefited from that.
There's some great funding with collaboration, the Canadian-Indian industrial partnership, the Canada-U.K. funding in terms of helping Canadian companies enter the market by collaborating with one of their own. I think they've been a big benefit. I would like to commend Amanda Wilson and Cynthia Handler,from the departmental side, for really leading that and paying attention to companies like ours and our growth.
A lot of MOUs that have been signed by the government in innovation have actually helped us, and the same thing with FedDev in terms of scaled and continued growth. However, having said all of that, which has built the ecosystem, one of the things I'd like to share is that I think we've done a great job on start-ups, but I think we haven't really looked holistically at the scale-up of companies. I think there are gaps in the scale-up aspect.
Opus One Solutions is no longer a start-up. We're a scale-up, so where do we go?
There are a couple of things to point out. Every jurisdiction in the world is revolving around clean tech. They want a sector to be grown there. They want taxes to be paid to their jurisdiction. What I would urge departments in the government to do is to actually take a competitive benchmarking. I personally don't think we do that well as a nation.
What I mean by that is that Germany and the U.K. are really pushing in tandem with companies in their jurisdictions to move globally—more, I would say, than we are. In terms of whether it be financing or giving funding to enter the market to do a pilot, I think that's critical for a lot of technologies. The majority of customers for our products or even my colleagues' prefer to have a case study or someone who has bought their product and tested it in their local market rather than having that done in a Toronto, Halifax or Vancouver. It doesn't carry as much weight. Everyone wants to know if you've done it in Illinois or Brazil, and so on and so forth. I think that's a big gap. That's missing.
The other one is in terms of financing or funding as you move towards profitability. I think most of EDC and our venture capital, whether they're government-backed or independent, have a tendency to try to want to deal, so we'd rarely invest in companies that have reached a valuation of $50 million-plus. We are one of the few companies that see, from a Canadian perspective, that there are not enough folks willing to bet on our own companies' growth because our valuation has gone up.
It's very much on start-up, not on scale-up. There we look at financing from other investors, which generally means that over time we will stop being a CCPC. I think that's something we should focus on. How do you ensure that there are more companies that continue to be CCPCs, that continue to apply for IP in Canada and are as Canadian as possible?
The other attribute I'd say that can be improved on is MOUs. Trade relationships are critical. As my colleague said, with buy America and buy Europe, how do we continue as a trading nation be in those discussions and help companies? There's also the fact that, in most of our agreements, we have a reliance on joint research and development. I think we should be cautious in pushing that. As a private entity, I would like to do customization of research to sell my product into a market of choice. I do not want to be beholden to doing research with a third party if there's an agreement or funding attached to that. I think uncoupling some of that would help us move into markets faster.
One of the other things I would also urge the committee to look at is that the goal of the Paris accord is a good one, but if we are to drive clean-tech companies abroad, I would rather that, as a nation, we would have objectives and goals that are audacious. An example of that would be that some of our provinces were chasing solar manufacturing or renewable manufacturing about a decade ago, 15 years after Germany had defined it. Germany defined it because they had an objective or a goal well before anybody else did, and by virtue of that, entrepreneurs came to that segment.
The U.K. and France, for example, have said they will not have a single combustion vehicle on their road by 2050. It's an audacious goal. What it means is that they're starting to think about what new industries have to be born to serve such a market if they're serious about that goal. I would urge Canadians and Canada to have an objective that we're driving towards.
I shall not talk more about buy America, it is of concern for us, especially with cybersecurity and security as an issue as well. I think it was covered by some of my colleagues. Really, what I would ask is to rethink some of our government funding and protocols to play more holistic role in terms of enhancing our growth in exports and paying taxes to Canada and employment in Canada.
Thank you.
View Sukh Dhaliwal Profile
Lib. (BC)
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I want to thank all the presenters for the leadership their companies have shown when it comes to clean technology and services. My first question will go to Mr. Subramaniam.
Mr. Subramaniam, you mentioned that you are going to expand across Canada. British Columbia has beautiful weather and wonderful people, and more important when it comes to environment technologies, it is a leader in those technologies. We have LNG, Ballard and many more to come.
How might you take advantage of what British Columbia has to offer? Do you see prospects for your company here?
Hari Suthan Subramaniam
View Hari Suthan Subramaniam Profile
Hari Suthan Subramaniam
2021-05-10 11:43
Thank you, Mr. Dhaliwal.
From a software perspective, we're a people-based business so talent is one of our biggest drivers. If I may speak openly and honestly, Toronto is a lovely city, but its growth in software and talent has ensured—in a good way, I think, for the federation—that we look at the talent pool across the federation. Vancouver is pretty good from a competitiveness perspective but also with respect to the talent pools coming out of universities and coming into the country through immigration.
We're looking at Vancouver but we're also looking at Prince Rupert and Victoria, while also looking at eastern Canada and Alberta as a talent base from a software perspective. Given the pandemic that has driven us to a virtual environment, the beautiful thing about Canadian companies like ours is that we can go to our own nation to find the best talent, irrespective of province or physical location.
Hari Suthan Subramaniam
View Hari Suthan Subramaniam Profile
Hari Suthan Subramaniam
2021-05-10 12:02
I would say a couple of things. One is to have a bit more holistic look from inside the government as we engage with companies, again focusing on more scale-up. Can the hand of government come in broadly to help our companies that are starting to scale up to move internationally?
One thing I would re-echo, which I think my colleagues would share, is the ability to look at funding and financing as a way to help companies enter a market. The trade commissioner service and the others are fantastic at making their connections and the networks, and we can definitely drive to get the deals ourselves, but what makes it easier is if you come together and say, “Let us ensure that we get into that market”. We find that our European colleagues are doing a much better job from a government perspective in really pushing their companies to enter such markets.
We've done a great job, but that doesn't mean we can sit on our laurels. I will say we need to competitively benchmark what others are doing and ensure that we do the same amount of support for our companies so we can be leaders globally, while at the same time—a couple of my colleagues shared this—we look at and create a domestic market.
There is a little bit of a mismatch, I would say, Madam Ashton, in that we look at domestic policy and domestic funding as being a bit aloof from helping companies to go international. The Americans, as we talked about, are linking it together. I'm not saying we need a buy Canada framework, but there are different avenues by which we can ensure Canadian companies do prosper while keeping trade regulations open for international companies to compete with us at home.
Results: 31 - 45 of 206 | Page: 3 of 14

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