OTTAWA, November 2, 2006 — The Honourable Maxime Bernier, Minister of Industry, today congratulated BizPaL for being recognized at the 2006 Canadian Information Productivity Awards (C.I.P.A.). BizPaL won the prestigious Diamond Award of Excellence, Best of Show, as well as the Gold Best of Category Award, Customer Care, Not for Profit category.

"On behalf of Canada's New Government, I'd like to congratulate BizPaL for its impressive work to date," said Minister Bernier. "BizPaL is an excellent example of how different levels of government are working together to improve service delivery to Canadian businesses."

BizPaL is an innovative service designed to help Canadian businesses save time when accessing licensing and permit information from multiple levels of government. This unique partnership between federal, provincial, territorial, regional and municipal governments provides entrepreneurs and business people with simplified access to the information they need to launch or grow their businesses.

The BizPaL service was developed with Industry Canada support, in collaboration with various provincial, territorial, municipal and regional governments. To date, BizPaL has been launched with the following partners: British Columbia and the City of Kamloops; Ontario and the City of Ottawa, and the Regional Municipality of Halton with the City of Burlington and the towns of Halton Hills and Milton; Saskatchewan and the City of Saskatoon; and Yukon with the municipalities of Carmacks, Dawson City, Faro, Haines Junction, Mayo, Teslin, Watson Lake and Whitehorse.

The C.I.P.A. Awards were celebrated on November 1 in Toronto. These annual awards recognize excellence in information technology and innovation implementation by all types of organizations across the country.

In addition to the C.I.P.A. Awards, BizPaL also recently received a silver medal for a GTEC 2006 Distinction Award (category: Cross-jurisdictional Partnerships) and was named winner of the Government of Canada's Public Service Award of Excellence (category: Citizen-focused Service Delivery).

To help accelerate the program expansion, the federal government recently announced in Budget 2006 an additional $6 million over two years for BizPaL.

Please visit http://www.bizpal.ca for additional project history and information as well as to access the websites of participating partners.

For more information, please contact:

Isabelle Fontaine
Office of the Honourable Maxime Bernier
Minister of Industry Canada
613-995-9001

Media Relations
Industry Canada
613-943-2502

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Date Modified: 2006-11-02 Important Notices