Thank you, Mr. Côté.
I want to thank you and in fact the chair for your continuing support of the all-party tourism caucus, because these issues are important to us across the board.
I'll deal with the question in two parts, first of all the resilience of the industry; then, there's a Conference Board piece coming out today that talks about the resiliency of the investment and the jobs in each of those ridings. But we also know—and these are not our numbers but Treasury Board-approved numbers from the return on investment statistics that the Canadian Tourism Commission puts out—of the quick turn-around in job creation that our sector provides, especially amongst young Canadians.
In fact, what we saw during the economic action plan and the stimulus package was a multiplier of those jobs in various regions of the country in a very quick fashion. How we get to what we would consider to be our fair share—Canada's 4%—is really a function of marketing and of accessing product. These are issues that we have dealt with at the caucus on a regular basis.
We could have gone through a litany of issues that we had through the deficit reduction action plan, but we understand that there were certain cuts that had to be made. The one that's probably the most debilitating for the sector is the lack of ability to invest in the U.S. market. We're not asking the federal government to go this alone. We're effectively setting up a model, much like what Brand USA is in the United States, whereby we're going to raise a dollar of investment for every dollar the federal government puts forward.