Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm David Paterson. I'm vice-president of corporate and environmental affairs for General Motors Canada and I'm the immediate past chair of the board of directors of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
I want to speak to you very briefly today about the importance of innovation and research and development, particularly in sustaining our very important auto sector in Canada.
I do believe that the next federal budget will be very important for Canada as we set out to compete as a nation and as enterprises and employers in the very fast-changing global economy that we see today. I believe that innovation will absolutely be essential as our driver of growth in Canada.
At GM we see enormous disruption in the global automotive sector right now. We believe in planning in our company for a future that will increasingly be vehicles that are electric, vehicles that are very highly connected with each other and the environment around them, autonomous or self-driving vehicles that are here today and will be here rapidly with us. Also, vehicles are going to be more increasingly part of the shared economy than just the traditional model of buying a car. You'll be getting your transportation through your smart phone. We have to replan our business and we have to replan our industry for those types of changes that are taking place. That has huge opportunities for us if we can do that, and it's very important that Canada think about those opportunities and where it will fit into that as well.
Earlier this year at General Motors of Canada we made two significant announcements. One recently is that we've reached a new collective agreement with our partners at Unifor. That set us on a path to invest a further half a billion dollars in our traditional manufacturing operations in Oshawa and St. Catharines. That's extremely good news for a traditional manufacturing industry. The other announcement that we made in June, which I think arguably is even more important for the long-term future of our industry in Canada, is that we will be expanding our base of research and development engineering in Canada. We're currently hiring 700 engineers in the area of active safety controls and software for autonomous vehicle development. We're doing that in Canada, and that's a global centre. This is very important. It's really the sweet spot of innovation for the automotive sector. These new high-tech jobs will be at the centre of a growing ecosystem as well. We have 300 engineers working in Oshawa, and we will soon be opening a new 700-person R and D facility for software in Markham, Ontario. We've bought seven acres of land here in downtown Toronto for a new mobility hub. We've opened up in Waterloo, and we're engaging with universities all across Canada. We spent a full day in 12 different universities across Canada this year. The next three are Sherbrooke, École Polytechnique, and McGill. All of that really is to underscore that the global automotive business is changing and transforming very rapidly. It's starting to look more like the ICT business than the traditional automobile business.
We selected Canada to do a great slice of this important technology for a bunch of key reasons. Canada does have a very competitive base of talent and it has a highly well-earned expertise in mobile communications, in software development, and in artificial intelligence, in fact, some of the best in the world.
I want to give you some recommendations in that regard. I've shared with you and your analysts the recommendations of the Canadian Automotive Partnership Council, and in particular its innovation committee. In short, we believe that Canada's auto sector needs to invent things that other people will manufacture, not just manufacture things that other people have invented. In short, we have the opportunity to grow an automotive technology cluster in Canada that is competitive with places like Silicon Valley in California, and Israel, but we need to foster that very purposefully with policies and budgets that support and attract three critical factors that will be important for Canada. One, we have to ensure we have global quality talent. Two, we have to have capital for our start-up and scale-up companies to become global companies in this area. Three, we have to think about the customers for those companies. Government procurement can be an important customer. But you also have to think differently between your domestic companies and your multinational companies. Big multinational companies have huge global supply chains. If little Canadian companies can start to use that as a customer base, they can become big global companies.
I worked previously at BlackBerry where we became a very big Canadian company by following those kinds of strategies and going around the world. So our advice is simply to look at how we can better leverage our universities and our public research institutions, some new approaches to fostering and attracting global talent here and bringing it into Canada, and advice on capital financing. There is an important need for Canadian start-up and scale-up companies to have intellectual property strategies that will protect them as they scale up around the world.
We share those recommendations with you, and I'd be pleased to discuss any of them.