I'd be in agreement with my colleagues here from business. The reason a manufacturing sector is important is that it is a relatively high productivity sector and that it has the capacity to generate ever higher productivity.
By far the majority of research and development expenditure in Canada is within the manufacturing sector. If we're going to be a major player in the global economy of the future, we simply can't abandon manufacturing, the business of making things.
A lot of important service industries make a huge contribution. A lot of those are tied, in turn, to manufacturing. It's not a matter of fetishizing blue collar, metal-bashing jobs. I think what we have to realize is that the manufacturing sector is changing. But with a dollar at parity, it's going to kill our potential across a huge swath of industries—important industries of the future, not least auto and aerospace, which have been absolutely key building blocks for our future.
It's not a matter of preserving the status quo, I think. It's that we have to change the manufacturing sector. We have moved up the value chain and have become much more innovative. But we're not going to get the investments and innovation and training and so on that we need if the dollar is killing off any prospect of profit from new investment, as Mr. Martin said, and I absolutely agree with him.