Thank you, Minister. I appreciate your opening statement.
I also need to reflect that I remember it was about this time last year when the finance committee was travelling, and in every meeting we went to, people were incredibly complimentary—Washington, New York—in terms of how Canada had seen itself through a very difficult time. I think perhaps we sometimes forget how fortunate we are in Canada in terms of the relative good health of both our employment numbers and our net debt to GDP.
Certainly, an important feature of that is, of course, our manufacturing industry. We know that about 1.8 million Canadians are employed in the manufacturing sector. Ontario, of course, took a significant hit during the global recession.
In this fragile economy, could you talk a little bit more about the beneficial measures in this bill in terms of our Canadian manufacturers and processors?