Thanks, Peter.
First of all, what I said earlier with regard to manufacturing is that we have a [Inaudible--Editor] time to reset. If you look at the history of the governments of the day, we don't have a long-term strategy when it comes to manufacturing.
I'll just share some statistics with you. If you look at the past 20 years, GDP from industrial production has essentially been stagnant. Manufacturing today accounts for about 10% of Canada's GDP, down from 16% in 2000. If you go back to the 1950s, we were at 30% of the GDP. You want to compare that with Germany, where manufacturing today is in excess of 60% of GDP.
We've not really focused on it, and here's our opportunity. We've heard a lot of discussions in regard to procurement. I see it every day with the industries we work in. We work in steel, we work in aluminum, we work in forestry. Why is it that we still cut our logs and put them on a ship and send them to Asia, and they come back to us as some piece of furniture or whatever you may have? Why are we still using steel from China that is going to go to Site C, or to the LNG, or to build a bridge in Montreal or a bridge in British Columbia?
There's no reason, when we talk about “Built in Canada”.... We should be proud of the kind of work we do and the abilities we have. We have a strong steel industry. We have an aluminum industry, we have a forestry industry. The fact is that this is an opportunity.
We can talk about just last week. We are just in the process of dealing with the CITT, where someone is trying to get rid of an order from the CITT on solar panels. They're coming from China. Give me a break. The reason they're coming from China is that they're cheap. The fact is that we can produce them here in our own backyard.
It's as simple as being able to build windmills. You talk about retrofit, you talk about green energy, and that's what it's all about, but you must have a strategy from the leaders of the government to basically say that we're going to get into manufacturing to do these things. Then we wouldn't be in the situation we are with the PPE.