Mr. Hejazi, a couple of things intrigued me with respect to your comments. When you look at foreign investment, there's always this dichotomy that plays out when we have these discussions, based on what percentage of foreign investments are made by Canadian companies in other countries, versus how many investments are made by foreign companies in our country, or how high those investments are.
In the last couple of years, KPMG showed very clearly that investments by Canadian firms in foreign companies far outweigh the investments that foreign companies have made in this country.
When you spoke, you were moving toward comments with respect to the global economy and the importance of Canada playing a role in that. When you go into ridings like mine, where there's a high contingent of manufacturing and industrial jobs, many of which have left the community....
I was at a meeting on Friday, and I can tell you that they certainly wouldn't agree with your assessment in terms of what we should do, or that we should continue to do that. In fact they would say that we need to put more walls up to ensure that competitiveness within the country is here, in terms of investment or tax policy, to ensure that there are high tariffs when countries are trying to import into our country.
I know I haven't left you much time, but I really would appreciate your commenting further on the importance of why we need to be competitive, and why any tax savings or tax money that we find from closing loopholes will actually be, as the minister committed to yesterday, reinvested back into making sure that we can lower corporate tax rates here in this country.