Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, members of the committee.
I'm here today with Angela Burton, who is our vice-president of communications and public affairs. I'm senior vice-president with Holcim Canada.
Before I move on to talk about our recommendations, I'd like to take a moment to review the history of Holcim and make you a little more familiar with Holcim Canada. We entered Canada in 1951 and we built our first cement plant in Quebec City. We were really drawn to Canada, and as a company based on the St. Lawrence Seaway, we used St. Lawrence as our company name.
Since then, through various investments and strategic acquisitions, we built a plant in Mississauga, Ontario. We are now one of the largest vertically integrated building supply companies in Canada with more than $1.3 billion revenue in 2008. We're owned by a Swiss company called Holcim. Holcim operates in 70 countries around the world and has 85,000 employees.
In 2009 we became a private company. Although Holcim is traded publicly worldwide, we're private and wholly owned by Holcim. We took the Holcim brand name to trade globally in cement. You know it locally here as Dufferin in the construction aggregate and concrete sectors, and you would know it locally in Quebec as De-Mix .
Naturally, infrastructure is very important to us, and the overall results of our restructuring of our economy as a result of the recession is very important to us as a company and very important to our employees. After a decade of strong performance, it's very important that government has engaged and continues to engage to ensure that companies like our own are able to survive through this significant restructuring of our economy.
As outlined in the submission, the U.S. recession has really prompted a lot of the impact that we've seen in Canada and we've seen as part of Holcim. One example is that the Detroit-Cleveland market is a natural market for a company like Holcim coming out of Mississauga, but to try to search out and react to the lack of demand in the U.S., we are now shipping cement from both Mississauga and Joliette to anywhere from Newfoundland to Alberta. Even with that we're down roughly 30% in volume over the course of this year.
We also believe that the Government of Canada has to stay the course. We're very happy with what has transpired with the infrastructure programs and the work that is being done on cap and trade. I think if we can stay the course by maintaining, accelerating, and supplementing these existing programs that are already up and running and proving successful, it will be beneficial to a company like Holcim and beneficial to Canada.
Our first recommendation does deal with tax. We would like to see extending the temporary 50% straight-line accelerated capital cost allowance rate to manufacturing or processing machinery and equipment acquired in 2010 and 2011. This provides real tangible support. Accelerating payback delivers significant tax relief and translates into measurable improvements in cash flow.
Additional measures, such as adjustments to payroll taxes, providing temporary super deductions for contributions to meet the unfunded pension liabilities, and favourable tax treatment for trust funding for post-retirement health care benefits would provide important additional support.
Last on the tax front, expanding the scope of scientific research and experimental development into areas such as environment and resource conservation would not only support companies financially but would also make a significant contribution to meeting our environmental objectives.
Moving on to infrastructure, we have seen infrastructure work in the past....
We're getting close?