Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to everybody on the committee.
I wrote my first paper on this industry in November 1969. That's 39-plus years of experience and about 5,000 studies later. That first paper built a mathematical model of this industry and came up with this phrase that you hear to this day and is true to this day, that one in seven jobs in Canada is dependent directly or indirectly on the auto industry.
I am the responsible person, and I wanted to bring that up first, because you're dealing with a pretty serious issue here. That number is very, very real. There are 800,000 direct jobs in our industry, and if you look at the permutations through what I call the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker jobs, you're looking at millions of additional ones. Keep that as a broad framework.
I've submitted a comprehensive deck. You'll be glad I'm not going to go through it. I tried to dumb it down as best I could, because I knew Jeff was here.