[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Thursday, December 7, 1995
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[English]
The Chairman: I call this meeting to order.
Now some of Mr. Penson's more difficult agricultural issues can be replaced by our small business study.
I welcome the mayor of Toronto.
Your Worship, we had representatives from the City of Calgary tell us of some very interesting small and medium-sized business enterprise activities they have. We look forward to hearing your position on how the City of Toronto encourages small and medium-sized business in the export sector. We thank you very much for taking time out of your very busy schedule to come before the committee.
If you could keep your opening remarks to ten or fifteen minutes, then the members, I know, have some interesting questions for you.
Ms Barbara Hall (Mayor of Toronto): Thank you. I'm pleased to be here. I'm particularly pleased to see Toronto so well represented on this committee.
Prior to my being elected mayor, your chairman and I represented overlapping areas, so we often ended up at the same meetings and often went to them on our bicycles. Regrettably I wasn't able to do that today.
The Chairman: I've given mine up too.
Ms Hall: I'm also one of the chairman's constituents.
It's good to be here and see you at work.
But most importantly, I'm pleased to be here because the issue your committee is looking at is one on which federal and municipal politicians must work together.
I'm encouraged by the Prime Minister's personal commitment to helping Canadian business pursue markets and opportunities abroad. His Team Canada missions are just one example of his involvement in this area.
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I'm pleased that the federal government has recognized the role played by the City of Toronto in international trade through the infrastructure support for our new National Trade Centre, which is currently under construction. At the City of Toronto, we share your commitment to international trade. Trade has helped Toronto become the vibrant, prosperous city it is today, and without question, continued and expanded trade is the foundation of our future economic strength.
We know many small and medium-sized businesses have difficulty reaching out to international markets, and I believe there is a role for government in helping them. Government can open doors and provide business with important advice, support and assistance.
There may be some who say this isn't a proper role for government and feel the best thing government can do for business is leave them alone. I disagree with that, and many Toronto businesses disagree also. I want to find ways we can work together.
Toronto has an extremely diverse community. If I'd been here three weeks ago, I would have said the United Nations has said we are the most diverse city in the world, but somebody challenged me on where the United Nations said that, and we discovered they never said it.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Ms Hall: But they should have said it, and we don't need them to say it. In fact we are an extremely diverse city, and that gives us a real opportunity in international trade.
I'm here to talk about Toronto, but I hope you'll see my concerns and the issues I raise as not simply the selfish concerns of one city but rather a statement of issues facing many municipalities, especially Canada's larger cities.
Toronto plays a unique role in Canada as the centre of the largest, most developed and most populated urban region in the country. Toronto is uniquely positioned to participate in the international marketplace.
Because of the large number of immigrants who have settled in Toronto, we have a uniquely skilled workforce with links to every corner of the world, and because of Toronto's size and economic diversity, we play a unique role in attracting foreign business to Canada and in selling Canada abroad. Whether you're seeking markets in Peru or the Punjab, Toronto has an instant existing sales force living within our city to show the way.
As Jane Jacobs observed over thirty years ago, only the large populations of major cities can support wide ranges of variety and choice, and this diversity allows an extraordinary number of small enterprises to flourish.
These small and medium-sized enterprises play an especially important role in the process of strengthening communities. Not only do they create more jobs than large multinationals, but they're also fundamentally different. They're more closely linked to their communities. Usually they're locally owned. Profits tend to stay in the neighbourhood. They reflect and respect local needs and values.
So I appear before you today not as a representative of business per se but as somebody who sees business as a dynamic and important player in a larger equation.
As mayor of a municipality, I also share your very real knowledge of the fiscal limitations governments face today. So I don't come to you today looking for handouts or asking you to open the fat federal wallet. I know our wallets aren't as full as they once were. In fact in Toronto our wallet's become a lot lighter just in the past week as a result of some actions at Queen's Park. I believe that what governments must do is not find new ways to spend money but find new ways to make our money go further. That's what I'd like to talk to you about, how our government can best help small and medium-sized businesses reach international markets.
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First I'd like to tell you a little bit about what we're doing in Toronto. What we do in Toronto to assist small and medium-sized enterprises is, first, to have excellent infrastructure, both hard and soft. We believe that is a factor in attracting business. A recent edition of Fortune magazine listed Toronto as one of the top 10 cities in the world in which to do business, and our quality of life was cited as a major reason for that. We know that because businesses can move wherever they want these days, that quality of life is important, and we believe it attracts people to our city.
Toronto has been very active in seeking international linkages with other cities, twinning or sister relationships. We currently have relationships with cities such as Amsterdam; Chicago; Frankfurt; Lima, Peru; Volgograd; Chongqing and Lisbon. We find that these arrangements serve not only a useful cultural role but also provide important economic linkages.
Let me give you an example of a couple of current things that are happening that emanate from that. In the last couple of days there was an announcement that the technology that built the Skydome in Toronto had just been chosen by the City of Frankfurt, with which we're a sister city. I met on several occasions with the deputy mayor of that city, the one who was charged with making the choices, and I think our relationship assisted in having this technology chosen. The deal in Frankfurt is worth about $400 million. Much of that money will be spent in Canada.
There is a similar process under way in Taipei also with the Skydome folks. Again, the role of the mayor and local council in supporting the ARCANCO company has opened a lot of doors for them and moved their bid way up the list.
At the City of Toronto we're working right now to create a mayor's economic partnership office. We're looking to bring together people representing many sectors to work with the city on marketing our city. We don't have the money to spend in many places in the world, but we know that many Toronto companies are in many places in the world, and we're going to create the partnership so that they'll be out there selling our city. We'll provide them with the resources they need in terms of information and contacts to assist them in doing that.
The whole design sector is an area where we've been active in Toronto. By design, I mean the whole range, including industrial design of consumer goods, urban planning, retail design packaging, communications, film and television, fashion, and advertising. This sector is strong in the city of Toronto today, and it generates over $1 billion annually in salaries and creates direct spin-offs that affect over 100,000 jobs. We're working to attract design sector buyers to Toronto. We send delegations to the large communications and design shows in the world. We have, in partnership with the federal government, the design exchange, the only one of its kind in North America.
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In film and television production, Toronto works hard to strengthen the film industry. Just last week Disney Studios announced that they're opening a new animation studio in Toronto. They said they were there not because of the Canadian dollar, which the press kept pushing them on, but rather because of a large and highly skilled workforce in the animation area that was not prepared to move to LA. They tried to woo them there. They were prepared to expand their operations in LA. But they said no, we want to stay.
Mr. Volpe (Eglinton - Lawrence): It must be the climate.
Ms Hall: The climate.
So today we do have the facilities and the trained labour force and are the third-largest film production centre in North America; and we are growing. At the city we look for ways to create partnerships with the federal government on that.
But there are many areas where we are involved and we see opportunities but we can't do it alone. We know Toronto's reputation can often get us internationally to the receptionist, but it's Canada's name and reputation that get us into the boardroom.
We can't take over the role of the federal government in acting on an international basis, but we can be a partner with you. We're actively pursuing opportunities to do that.
Two months ago I led a trade mission to Asia. This was an initiative among the City of Toronto, the design exchange, the design industry, and the federal government. It was a tremendous success. It helped open the door to a number of important business deals. Some have already been signed and others are in the works. It's in areas such as Canadian designers and planners and builders working with Taiwanese companies to assist in the development of major shopping centres.
While I was in Taipei I visited a building site where the bulk of the building crew were Toronto workers. They were building in Taipei with Ontario-made cupboards, Ontario-made door frames. Virtually everything but the cement in the building came from Ontario. The city and the federal government working together allowed that to happen.
While I was in Taipei the Canadian trade office in Taipei was extremely helpful on the ground. Federal assistance through the export market development program enabled Toronto businesses to be part of the mission. I think the federal grant in all of this Taipei delegation was something in the neighbourhood of $80,000. A couple of dozen Toronto companies were there. Already we're seeing real contracts come out of that.
In the Taipei area, many of the decisions are made by the local government. Having the mayor there made a difference. Having your federal government staff there also made a difference. So this was a wonderful example of partnership.
But not all is rosy. On several occasions we've come up against some problems, hit potholes. But I didn't come to Ottawa to complain about how Toronto is being treated. Still, allow me to mention one issue, which applies not to business specifically but to Toronto as a whole.
In many instances there don't appear to be clear criteria for federal support or assistance. One example is the federal government's awarding of international banking centre designations in 1988. To the city of Toronto such a designation would have meant a great deal. We were quite confident that as the centre of Canadian banking and the location of almost every bank's head office, Toronto would be the natural choice. At the end of the day, however, when two cities were awarded international banking centre designations, Toronto was not amongst them.
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That seems strange to us, and as I travel around the world it seems strange to people in other cities and countries. They know where they do business, yet the designation is somewhere else. That raises questions about the confidence of the federal government in us as a city. So that is an area where we would like to see some change.
Let me turn to some constructive suggestions. The challenge is for us to work together, after all, and I have five specific ideas.
First, there is the issue of NGOs, or non-governmental organizations. Partially because of our diversity as a community and partially because of the comfort with which people of any background feel they have access to their language and their culture, Toronto remains an extremely attractive location for international NGOs. What I'd like to see is an ongoing cooperative relationship between Canadian representatives at international NGOs and municipalities like Toronto. By having more NGOs, we believe we could assist small and medium-sized businesses to have an entrée into and connections with the rest of the world. This would assist them in expanding their international trade.
Secondly, Toronto is a strong supporter of the federally-led Team Canada approach to opportunities in the emerging global market, but we believe cities like Toronto must be key players on Team Canada, not just enthusiastic supporters on the sidelines.
I know there's an upcoming Team Canada mission to India. The city of Toronto has over 10,000 citizens with roots in India, many of whom are intimately and personally acquainted with the culture, political situation, customs and economic needs of India. Toronto has hundreds of businesses that already do business with India. We have an Indian bazaar and Indian merchants with their own business improvement area, and we have strong cultural ties to India.
The upcoming trade mission to India, unlike the mission to China, does not have any municipalities taking part in it. We think this is an opportunity that's being missed. In future, we should work with the federal government to explore opportunities so that Team Canada missions include representatives of, in the case of Toronto, the largest population community in the country. When communities have unique advantages, like Toronto does in terms of its diversity, we think we're all losing if we don't take advantage of those.
Third, we would strongly support the placement of more Canadian trade officers at international financial institutions like the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank. Trade officers at these institutions could help cut through the bureaucratic clutter to assist Canadian companies to bid on large projects. We have the companies capable of building sewage plants and hospitals anywhere in the world, and we can certainly put together the necessary consortia. All we need, and all our businesses need, is someone to help us identify those opportunities before the train has left the station.
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Fourth, we need some clear criteria and clear commitments from Ottawa when it comes to international bids. Toronto's bid for the Framework Convention on Climate Control secretariat was one that had the support of a lot of small and medium-sized high-tech firms in the Toronto area. I think what happened in that process was that the federal government didn't get involved early enough.
Toronto prepared a solid bid for the international head office. We had a lot of corporate support from small and medium-sized and even some large companies, but we realized early on that we couldn't match the bids from countries like Germany, where the federal government had offered to contribute significant amounts. Ottawa couldn't match the German government's commitment.
The City of Toronto in fact agreed to commit $1 million to make this bid happen. We knew it would be good for our city and for our companies. The federal government looked at the issue and in fact finally made a decision to match our support, but it was just a few days before the final decision was made and we felt it was really too late and weakened our bid.
So if there were criteria and processes in place at the beginning, I think we would be in a stronger position and we would all benefit from that. In contrast, when Montreal was bidding for the UN biodiversity headquarters, federal support was there early and Montreal's bid was successful. We don't necessarily want a huge financial commitment. We want the criteria and the understanding that early on we'll work together and that the rules and the processes are clear.
My fifth suggestion is more general. It's a matter of cities and regions working with the federal government to identify certain sectors in which they can be world leaders. Whether it's the high-tech industry in the Kitchener-Waterloo area or environmental technologies in Montreal, it's clear that in this country we can be players on the world stage. Once we've made decisions to target certain sectors, we can work better together to help these centres of excellence succeed.
Barcelona and Milan didn't become the design centres of Europe by accident; it was the result of a clear and focused effort on the part of the private sector and all levels of government. Toronto is not a leader in all sectors, but we are in some areas, and not just because of our size but because of the talent pool we have, because of areas we have pursued.
I think all these suggestions are realistic and can be implemented at very little cost, and in many cases at no additional cost at all. We all know that government can't be all things to all people, but what government can do, what government should do, is support communities and businesses at critical stages in their development. The key is to take advantage of our existing strengths and carefully target our support.
Let me leave you with a final example of how everything can fit together. Pacific Entertainment Group is a small Toronto company that designs ice sports facilities. Their success is due in part to our decision to actively support the design sector. This Pacific Entertainment Group recently entered into deals with major cities in China, including Shanghai and our sister city Chongqing, a city of17 million people. These agreements are to provide state-of-the-art indoor ice sports facilities - year-round, climate-controlled complexes that include satellite uplinks and TV production facilities as well as restaurants, fitness centres, movie theatres, fast food outlets and office and retail space.
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They came up with innovative techniques to market their proposal, including teaching the Chinese ambassador and his wife to skate here in Ottawa. Their project was a key element of the Team Canada trip led by the Prime Minister to China in October 1994.
Benefits from this deal will not flow just to Pacific Entertainment Group in Toronto but to suppliers and designers in Vancouver, Burlington, and elsewhere. The planned construction company is from Montreal. What could be a better way to showcase Canadian know-how and what could be a more Canadian export than ice rinks - except perhaps ice itself?
Despite all of this, Pacific Entertainment Group hasn't yet put a shovel in the ground because of financial hurdles. It's a small company without a long track record, and financing is tough to get. Banks are too risk-averse and the private sector lenders say they can't afford to take the risk.
I say we can't afford to let innovative proposals like this die on the drawing board. Our Canadian flag is internationally recognized as a symbol of our nation's dignity and character. The world has confidence in our good name. Let's build on this proud history. Let's show the world how much more Canada can do, and let's do it together in partnerships between cities like Toronto and you at the federal level.
The Chairman: Thank you very much.
Mr. Leblanc.
[Translation]
M. Leblanc (Longueuil): Our mandate, first and foremost, is to find a way to help small businesses improve their performance on international markets. Is Toronto home to a world trading centre that works well and what role do each of the partners in this centre play? I'm thinking, for example, about the federal, provincial and municipal governments and also about the business community.
A great deal of initiative was often displayed in the past and the principle partners were business people themselves. Much is being said about duplication. The federal government has its own trade offices, while the provinces and municipalities have theirs and the business community has its boards of trade. How can we work together to ensure that our efforts are more productive, particularly with a view to helping our small and medium-sized businesses?
[English]
Ms Hall: I think the first step is to communicate and get people together. For example, on my trip to Taipei we worked very closely with the federal representatives in Taipei. In fact, they provided on-the-ground support.
The municipal government and the presence of the mayor opened doors for the federal representatives within that community, and vice versa. Many of the issues were brought to us first by the small and medium-sized businesses at the ground level who are working on a daily basis with their municipal government.
I think we're all concerned about duplication and we're all concerned about groups of politicians or bureaucrats going off to different parts of the world. One day there's a federal group there, and the next day it's a provincial group. The next day there are a dozen municipal groups. I think that's bad.
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That's why I think the Team Canada approach is such a useful one. It's an opportunity for business, local governments and the federal government to all come together, to recognize where the commonality is and devise a strategy with a role for each to ensure there isn't any duplication. None of us can afford to have a penny wasted through duplication.
In the area of design, which I've spoken about a little, local government was approached by the design community in the city of Toronto to look for help in finding a home for a design institute. We saw a role for us there. We were the level of government that these small and medium-sized businesses knew. They had never worked with the federal government. But we recognized there were some advantages to having a design strategy, not just in Toronto but also nationally. So we pulled in the federal government and were able to pool our resources and our know-how in a way that has benefited and strengthened the companies.
The Chairman: Thank you. Mr. Mills.
Mr. Mills (Red Deer): Welcome. I certainly want to commend you on your theatre industry and how it attracts an awful lot of people to Toronto. That's the number one reason why I like going to Toronto.
Ms Hall: We like to hear that.
Mr. Mills: You've touched on a couple of things I could just comment on. I think one is the duplication. One of the things we've been looking at is whether our foreign affairs offices are delivering the service that helps get the job done for cities, business, and so on. We've had varying evaluations. It's good to hear that your Taiwan experience was a good one.
I wonder as well about something you mentioned in terms of the multicultural nature of this country, and certainly your city, whether you feel we utilize that enough in our marketing of Canada.
My third comment relates to cities and provinces as much as anything else and the interprovincial trade barriers that seem to exist. One province puts up barriers against the other provinces instead of trying to get rid of those barriers so we can go out as Canadians to compete in the world.
I see that in cities somewhat as well, where one city doesn't really want to hear about another city being able to do something better. Instead of getting behind that city, it just pushes its own. So you get five cities all pushing as if they were bitter opponents.
In some other countries like Australia, for example, if Melbourne is best equipped to do a certain job Sydney will help Melbourne. I know it's human nature to say ``My city can do everything'', but in reality some cities can offer more than others. I wonder how we can get around that. I think you know what I'm trying to get at.
Ms Hall: In the greater Toronto area we're working hard on that problem. There's an organization of mayors in the greater Toronto area, and I'm embarrassed to say that in the last term of our council the then mayor of Toronto never attended a single meeting of the greater Toronto area mayors. It was sort of felt that Toronto could operate on its own and didn't need these other communities.
The day after I was elected I phoned the mayor of Mississauga, who was the chair of that organization, and said I wanted to host the first meeting the next month in Toronto. I told him I wanted all the mayors to come there. I wanted to make it clear that we need to work together on a number of issues, economic development being one of them, and on an international basis we need to speak with one voice. To have business come or to have a company in the region succeed internationally is good for the entire region. So we've started developing ways in which to work together.
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For example, whereas cities used to go individually to international trade fairs, we now have a greater Toronto area booth at a trade fair and one or two representatives go, representing the whole region.
We're also doing some work on looking at areas of specialty. You mentioned the theatre. The downtown, very urban arts community is not something that will be duplicated in other areas. It's one of the reasons why people in the surrounding region like to live in that region, because of their proximity to it. So there's an interest for all of us in strengthening that. We need to look for the other areas that make the urban core more successful because of their proximity.
So it involves coming and sitting down together and starting to talk about the issues pulling people together. Every person in government, wherever they are, is under enormous pressure and scrutiny about not spending a penny on duplication. So perhaps it's a better time than some others in which to create those sorts of partnerships, because people won't tolerate the turf wars.
The Chairman: Mr. Volpe.
Mr. Volpe: I, too, would like to offer my thanks and welcome to the mayor of Toronto. Even though it is not my city, I lived there for some 21 years.
I'm especially pleased that the mayor was able to outline a couple of points. One is some of the advantages that a city such as Toronto might have not only for itself, but that it offers for all of Canada and all Canadian businesses. She highlighted two essential ingredients in that one, and I'll just make an observation.
One is the demographic component, which we have heard about from many others but we haven't really learned yet to capitalize for the purpose of small and medium-sized businesses. But you're right in highlighting the fact that it's an important linkage for us in international markets.
The second is that there is an enormous swell and generation of small businesses in communities such as Toronto, or I dare say, as I said jokingly with my colleague opposite, even Red Deer or Quebec City or wherever. When you have this many small numbers of people in communities, the general initiative is to have a smaller business and to grow from there.
I was particularly taken by the five suggestions you made for greater cooperation between federal and municipal authorities for the purposes of generating greater activity for small and medium-sized enterprises. In that regard I was taken by two specifically, and I wonder if you can give us additional comment.
Your first suggestion, of course, was that a place such as Toronto might be able to generate a home for greater numbers of international NGOs, which I found remarkable. You did not suggest that we're fulfilling a great humanitarian role, but you focused on the opportunities and the entrées that they have for small and medium-sized businesses in the international market-place. I wonder if you could comment on that a bit further in a moment.
In the second one you're almost unique. I missed the presentations of the mayor of Calgary and other mayors, so I can't comment on that part; but all the other presentations before this committee on actually increasing the number of trade officers that we would have.... You have specifically said that they go before the IMF and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and, I guess, the Asian Development Bank and others. I'd like you to elaborate on that a little bit more, if you wouldn't mind.
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Ms Hall: In terms of our diversity and the opportunities that presents to us, I think that's something we've ignored even at the local level. We know every language, and there are groups of successful small business people who know every culture and business regime in every part of the world. That's something we need to exploit in a positive way, and I think Toronto is the perfect place to do that.
When we bid for the climate convention treaty office, we had a lot of support from people in the high-tech industry, the communications industry. They recognized the opportunity for economic activity to flow from that for them. At one level it's a certain prestige that brings people to the city and allows the opportunity to meet people. Again, our diversity and our safety and the infrastructure as a city are a big attraction to people who two decades ago might have wanted to go to New York City. They no longer feel comfortable going to New York City or moving their families or their children there.
In the climate convention thing and the whole amount of work that is being done in environmental clean-up, our business community saw it as an enormous advantage to have such an office there. Our willingness to put $1 million into that was for economic reasons. We saw it as an economic development tool. As human beings, we want clean air, but it was the economic aspects of it that we were promoting.
We're continuing to look in the environmental area, because we think we have a considerable amount of expertise in that area to bid for other businesses. We think it brings the world to the city and allows our businesses the opportunity to meet with it and market their expertise and products.
About the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, our concern is that often businesses don't learn about available projects until it's too late. They don't get the information and have the opportunity to bid or to put together the kinds of consortiums that are sometimes necessary. That's one suggestion for a way of doing that. There may be other mechanisms.
It's all about information. A number of things I spoke to are reflections of the fact that we think we have some wonderful expertise and very skilled small and medium companies that are and would be competitive globally if they had the information early on, so they could get in at the start and bid. The World Bank and Asian Development Bank seem to be two places where we missed the boat.
The Chairman: Mr. Lastewka, you had a question.
Mr. Lastewka (St. Catharines): Mine was along the line of NGOs and business. Do you now have a program going on with business and NGOs, and could you explain it?
Secondly, I know in the past there's been a metro-cities group across Canada. They used to meet -
Ms Hall: The Federation of Canadian Municipalities?
Mr. Lastewka: No, I think it was just the large cities.
Ms Hall: Yes. There's a big-city component for that, the big-city mayors.
Mr. Lastewka: Within that big-city mayors group, have you looked at how to approach international trade more effectively for Canada?
Ms Hall: Yes.
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I'll answer your last question first. We're very actively involved in the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and their international trade and development programs. In fact, the former mayor, Art Eggleton, was very involved at FCM at the time when Toronto and FCM moved into those programs. Sometimes it's economic development, sometimes it's humanitarian, sometimes it's transfer of expertise, but we're involved in a number of programs. A lot of the assistance and expertise in approaching the development of our sister city relationship in China came through FCM.
We have an NGO in Toronto, the ICLEI, which is the UN local authority's agency dealing with climate and the environment - it's housed at a dollar in our city hall, in fact. It's an NGO that we have supported through space for several years. It brings people from around the world, but it's also a real resource. A number of contracts between local companies and other countries and companies in other parts of the world have developed as a result of the expertise our people have obtained through their proximity to it, and also through the contacts from people coming to Toronto.
Mr. Lastewka: From my discussion with the mayor in Calgary last spring when we were doing some foreign affairs meetings, I know the greater Calgary area also has an outreach program with small communities when they get into situations of trade - communities thirty to fifty miles away. As they're travelling around the world, when they get into situations in which people would want to go into small cities, they automatically have so many cities in an outreach program. Is a similar thing done in Toronto?
Ms Hall: We have staff who work with foreign companies coming to Toronto. Clearly our interest would be in having them located within the city of Toronto. If that doesn't work, then we help them make the contacts so that they can be in the region. We recognize the fact that a net increase in wealth anywhere in our region benefits all of us. We recognize that some things are properly in the downtown of an urban core, while others don't make any sense there at all. So we will work closely with local officials in other communities and the corporate sector to find the link that works.
The Chairman: Calgary and Montreal both indicated to us that the city has a plan about what activities are dynamic for their area. The businesses advise them on that - they have an advisory council - and they build from there to determine what other cities they should relate to. Does the city of Toronto have that sort of master vision, or is that what you suggested you were going to build when you said earlier that you were going to establish...?
Ms Hall: Right now, we're actually in the midst of an economic development strategy for the next five years. A part of that is the marketing partnerships that I've spoken of, but it's also selecting those sectors. The design sector is an area that's been selected in the past. Medical technology and research is something that's been developed in the past. We were delighted, again, to be able to use some infrastructure funds in a fairly innovative way to fund a major medical laboratory, because we see that as being something that brings companies and activity to the city of Toronto.
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The financial sector clearly is an area, but in terms of seeing other areas that expand beyond health and education, and finance, and design, and tourism, and entertainment, we'll have a more specific strategy early in the new year.
The Chairman: We've gone well over time, so I thank you for taking as much time as you did with us, Ms Hall. We appreciate that very much. You've given us good information for our report, and we'll look forward to sending you a copy of it.
I just want to remind the members that next Tuesday at 9 p.m. we'll be doing departmental outlooks at CIDA. So, Mr. Mills, come properly armed.
You'll recall, also, that on Tuesday afternoon the French ambassador will be coming to the committee to speak on the French nuclear tests. I think it will be at 3 p.m. We'll have him for about two hours.
Mr. Bergeron (Verchères): We should also ask for the Chinese ambassador.
The Chairman: Yes.
Mr. Bergeron has suggested to me that after the French ambassador has come, we might write to the Chinese ambassador and say, ``The French ambassador came. Why don't you come, too?'' That's a good suggestion. I'll follow that up.
I remind all the members that we want to add two members to the human rights subcommittee. Since we've lost our quorum, I'll do that the next time.
We stand adjourned until 9 a.m. on Tuesday.