Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for inviting my colleague Jenny and me to speak with you today.
On behalf of CAW national president Ken Lewenza, we extend our appreciation to the committee for allowing us the space to offer our perspective in regard to the multi-faceted Buy American deal that was recently struck between the federal governments of Canada and the United States.
We commend the committee for having organized these hearings. They provide a good opportunity for Canadians to better verse themselves on the important role that public procurement plays across each level of government with respect to economic and social development.
The Canadian Auto Workers union is Canada's largest private sector union. We represent over 225,000 members across the country in nearly every sector of the economy.
Over the past years, our union has focused a great deal of policy and campaign work on what we see as the underuse of domestic content policies when governments at all levels procure goods and services. Domestic content policies, when used properly, can be a strategic lever to encourage domestic economic and social development, particularly as that relates to maintaining a strong and vibrant manufacturing base in Canada.
Canada's economic climate in recent years, notwithstanding the devastating impact of the global recession, has led to a dramatic decline in Canadian manufacturing capacity and employment. The persistently high Canadian dollar, the current patterns of unbalanced global trade, and the absence of much-needed interventionist policies to spur economic growth beyond the government's stimulus program have contributed to the loss of over 550,000 manufacturing jobs since 2002.
Those are direct jobs. That number doesn't account for the associated spinoffs and supply-chain jobs that are reliant on them. Shockingly, there are more Canadians employed in the retail trade today than there are in value-added manufacturing.
We are aware that our purpose here today isn't to talk about the misfortunes of the domestic manufacturing sector. These remarks will simply provide the committee with the necessary context to better understand the lens through which we see this bilateral exemption deal in question.
With respect to this particular deal, we want to express two areas of concern to you today.
Firstly, we are gravely concerned that this deal was negotiated and signed without tangible evidence that it will deliver meaningful and measurable benefit to Canada in terms of greater economic activity and job creation. We were dissatisfied to learn, after an informative and revealing conversation with representatives of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, that no cost-benefit analysis had been conducted to determine the strengths and the weaknesses of this deal for Canadians in terms of investment and jobs, both on the temporary and the permanent sides of the deal.
Whether Canada stands to benefit from this particular arrangement is entirely speculative at this point. Estimating annual U.S. procurement dollars, assuming Canadian companies will have the ability to access those dollars, and hoping those companies translate those dollars into economic growth here at home is a dangerous basis on which to establish a groundbreaking and game-changing trade deal.
Considering the gravity of this exemption deal on our collective ability to manage and control our economic fortunes, in both the short term and the long term, it would seem only logical that a thorough costing of this particular deal and the variety of alternatives would have been foundational in determining the actual value of the deal.
It's for these reasons that we find it very difficult to understand how the trade minister and other proponents of this deal can say with any certainty that this deal provides reciprocity of access between our two countries in the area of procurement.