Border barriers are hurting Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), but there are fixes available.
That’s the message in a policy brief, Border Barriers: SMEs experience with cross-border trade, released this morning by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB).
“What we were trying to do was to really dig down a little bit into what exactly were those [border] barriers that small business was facing, and I think it comes down to complexity and the paperwork associated with it,” said Corinne Pohlmann, CFIB’s vice-president, national affairs.
“There are policies out there that are making it easier for larger companies, but those don’t apply to smaller companies necessarily because they’re just too expensive to be involved with or [SMEs are] just not big enough.”
Pohlmann said the CFIB is recommending a number of fixes, including the creation of a program to give SMEs access to a trade facilitation process, plus ways to make border processes more comprehensible.
“You deal with so many different departments when you’re trying to cross the border, either on the American side or the Canadian side,” she noted. “It’s kind of up to the small business owner to figure out, ‘Well, OK, if I’m bringing this in or putting that across the border, how many departments do I have to deal with?’ and there’s no sort of central place to go to to say, ‘OK, I’ve got to talk to them, them, them and them.’”
The CFIB is advocating a one-stop web portal for SMEs to access information about trade and border issues and conduct border paperwork online.
Pohlmann stressed the significance of the border topic to SMEs.
“We believe that in order for businesses to want to expand and grow, one of the options to do that is to be able to export or look at other markets and if it’s difficult to do that just going into the United States, imagine how much more difficult it’s going to be to do that in other countries,” she said.
“We have the NAFTA agreement, we’re supposed to have free trade and yet it does seem like sometimes there are more and more barriers between the countries.”
Jenny Wagler
Twitter: JennyWagler_BIV