Thank you very much.
I would like to thank the committee for having us. We did submit a brief. We were a last-minute addition to the agenda, so unfortunately we didn't have time to have it translated. I apologize for that. We will get translated copies submitted later.
I represent the Steelworkers union. Our union represents over 280,000 members in Canada in a wide variety of industries, including forestry, steel, manufacturing, transportation, and a number of service sectors. We also have a wide-ranging interest in budgetary matters, including improvements to health care and improvements to post-secondary education, etc., but what I really want to focus on today is some of the problems we've been having in certain key industrial sectors and certain public policy fixes for those problems.
We believe that the key goal for a national economic policy should be creating an environment where there's a good job in a safe workplace for every Canadian, and we certainly acknowledge that productivity and international competitiveness in the current economic environment are keys to being able to achieve that goal. We believe the way to get there, in a manner that is best for society, is by investing in education and training, maintaining a strong infrastructure, investment in R and D, product and process innovation, and investment in new plant and equipment.
Right now, talking about competitiveness is frustrating for labour, because when we look at the numbers.... KPMG recently concluded, in a study done for Industry Canada, that Canada had the lowest business cost environment among G-7 nations. We have also observed in the past number of years that productivity has been increasing and wages have not. So we're not inclined to think that problems in our sectors have anything to do with labour costs being too high or for that matter the overall corporate tax rate being too high.
On the other hand, our record on research and development, training, investment in capital equipment, and process and product innovation seems to be kind of wanting. A recent World Economic Forum report on competitiveness ranks Canada 27th out of 58 countries in its ability to compete based on unique products or process. Also, our R and D spending is lower than Sweden, Finland, Japan, Korea, Germany, and many others, and when it comes to spending on capital equipment, Canadian spending on plant and equipment per worker is between 30% and 60% of what it is in the United States. And finally, the same World Economic Forum on competitiveness ranked us 17th in higher education and training.
From labour's perspective, we think that public policy should be focused on trying to improve these kinds of areas.
I want to briefly touch on the importance of manufacturing for the Canadian economy. Right now, manufacturing employs over two million Canadians. Manufacturing wages are on average about 28% higher than the Canadian average, and the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters Association estimates that for every one dollar of manufacturing work, three dollars of economic activity in this country is created.
I don't want anybody here to have the impression that the manufacturing sector is an old smokestack, old economy. The sector is dynamic, and it does continue to change. Nearly 70% of what is manufactured in this country is exported now, up from only 25% years ago. But the sector is troubled. Nearly 200,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost in the last three or four years. The combination of a rising Canadian dollar, soaring energy costs, and competition from low-wage economies such as China have severely challenged the ability of Canadian businesses to compete. We see the boom in oil and other commodities in construction, but in manufacturing it's hurting.
The union doesn't believe that we should be complacent while we're watching this painful job loss. If we allow our manufacturing sector to decline, we will be weaker, and it's not as though a lot of new jobs are going to be created in the so-called new economy. Professional services and software companies are subject to the same kinds of global pressures that manufacturing is. All it takes to transfer intellectual property out of the country is one person with a laptop and an e-mail address, and if you just look at the number of jobs--