For the first hundred years of the automotive sector, the entry barriers to competing in automotive were so high that GM, Ford, and Chrysler were largely protected from international competition. In the last 15 or 20 years, those entry barriers have dropped and these global companies have had the capabilities of jumping into the market where they never were before.
If you go back into the 1960s and 1970s, you had three companies that could indeed have 90% or 95% of the market. Today you have at least eight, or perhaps ten, companies that have to share the same market. I don't care how you cut it, it doesn't matter whether GM, Ford, and Chrysler screwed up or didn't screw up, if you have eight companies sharing the market instead of three, the original three are going to be smaller.
The mistakes that GM, Ford, and Chrysler made—and they made many—got them smaller faster; that's all. They were going to be smaller.
They've gone through a three-part process. The first was to resize. That's largely done. They've closed up 3.5 million units of capacity. There might be a plant or two or three left. Unfortunately, one is still left in Canada to be dealt with.
Now they're in the restructuring. They're redoing their labour agreements in the United States; they're redoing their supplier agreements. This fall, they're going to redo their Canadian labour agreements, and Canadian labour is going to have to face the music on that.
Now we're in the earliest stages of reinvesting. GM, Ford, and Chrysler have committed billions, along with Toyota and Honda, to reinvesting in Canadian plants, and many, many billions tomorrow, into the next 10 years. With the climate change agenda forced on them by the U.S. government and with all this restructuring, it's creating a huge amount of capital. These companies will be investing an unbelievable amount of money into two things: new plants for new products, and new technologies to make these products a lot cleaner.
That's where Canada's opportunity is, to make sure we're well positioned from a policy perspective and from a competitive position to get our fair share of investments in the new plants and to get our fair share of investments in all those new technologies that are coming. The amount of investment is going to be three, four, or five times what it has been in the last decade, and we have a huge opportunity to take advantage of that.