Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I will first go to Ms. Webb since I was taken aback by her earlier comment. She said:
“Our industry has learned to cope with a 95¢ U.S. dollar....”
If I may, I would like to read her a quote from Statistics Canada dated August 16, 2007:
The Canadian economy doesn't have “Dutch Disease”...the Dutch case involved the discovery of a new resource, while Canada's recent trend stems from the integration of emerging nations...
In 2009, just two years later, Statistics Canada did a 180-degree turn. In a document called “Trends in Manufacturing Employment , Statistics Canada said the following:
...employment in manufacturing experienced a clear downward trend with successive annual losses of at least 3% from 2005 to 2008.
So, two years later, their analysis was completely different:
In these four years, more than one in seven manufacturing jobs were lost. These losses resulted in the rapid erosion of the share of manufacturing jobs in the economy...
We are even told that 322,000 jobs disappeared in Canada during that period.
Is that how our industry learned to cope, by losing 322,000 jobs? Is that your analysis? Is that the Scotiabank's official position on this, that this was coping, losing 322,000 jobs?