Thank you, Chairman Easter.
I'm pleased to be with you on behalf of Canada's chemical sector and the plastics manufacturers. For those who don't know us well, we're Canada's third-largest manufacturing industry, with about $60 billion a year of shipments.
To begin, I want to extend our sector's appreciation to Parliament and to the Government of Canada for how quickly you have put in place a number of these measures to support individuals and the economy, businesses broadly. I'll speak to our sector. We haven't relied on those measures, but our customers have. They've been very important and you've really demonstrated leadership in this unprecedented challenge.
I have three brief messages for you with respect to the status of Canada's chemistry sector. It is resilient, responsive and poised to contribute to the economic recovery.
First, our chemistry sector is a highly resilient sector. There have been no material impacts on the sector from COVID-19. In our industry, over half of our members report that they are operating at normal levels of production for this time of year. We do have about 30% who say they're still operational but are operating at lower than normal levels. You can think of folks selling chemicals, paints and coatings to the automotive sector. There were a number of tough weeks there, but they were operational. We have another 20%, however, who are actually producing above normal capacity. Overall, the sector hasn't relied on any economic supports and it has no intention to rely on sector supports. It doesn't need a package and has experienced very few layoffs in any company across the sector. It's highly resilient.
Second, the chemistry sector is highly responsive and responsible. We produce very important water treatment and disinfection chemicals that are essential for public safety in a crisis such as this, and we've certainly seen a steep increase in demand for those products. We'll talk about plastics perhaps during some of the questions, but plastics were a pretty unwelcome product until COVID-19 came along, and all of a sudden, plastic products were in demand. You can think of the packaging of food. We have as members the folks who manufacture for the medical industry. The sanitary value of plastic is now understood in a way that we did, but folks such as yourselves and Canadians did not understand before this crisis. There's a very important role being played by plastics. You can think of all the PPE that is needed. There is so much plastic in there, so there are huge demands for those products.
Our members have also reconfigured their production processes. We have people such as BASF Canada, which makes paints and coatings in Windsor. They pivoted and now they're making hand sanitizer and donating that product. Shell Chemicals and Procter and Gamble Canada have also reconfigured their operations for the first time ever to produce these essential products to help with this response.
I'll give you one other example of how the industry has responded. This again was led by BASF Canada and Trimac, both of which are members of our association. They created a platform called the rapid response platform and it is now matching those that have PPE available with those that need PPE to restart their businesses. In the first week of operations alone, it has made matches between 10,000 organizations in Canada—in the one week it has been online. You go online and say you need 5,000 plastic gowns for your dentist office. Someone will come back online and you will get that. There were 10,000 matches in the first week alone, and we're very proud to have contributed to that.
Third and finally, this industry stands very well poised to assist with Canada's economic recovery. We currently have $7 billion of new capital investment that has continued under construction. Despite this crisis, those projects are continuing. They will come online in late 2021 or early 2022, and you can imagine what a shot of support to the economy that $7 billion of new investment will contribute. There are a few projects that were under way and have been deferred, and a few others that were proposed and are not yet going. Those projects currently total about $11 billion, and we're confident that as we come out of this crisis we're going to hear that some of them are going to move ahead as planned. The conditions will be there for them to continue to invest and to assist in the recovery.
Our large major facilities, though, have also had to defer all major capital investment because of this crisis. These projects, routine maintenance projects, can involve thousands of contractors and hundreds of millions of dollars. You just couldn't bring contractor staff in those numbers on site during COVID and risk contaminating your operators and taking your site down.
That activity is going to have to happen. Hopefully we come out of this recovery soon, in the coming weeks, and that can start to take place late in the summer and fall, or at worst early next year.
When you total that up, that's more than a billion dollars of preplanned maintenance activity also happening in our sector.
When we put that all together again, the three messages are that the sector is highly resilient; it's highly responsive, and we do stand poised to contribute to the economic recovery. Certainly the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec are looking to the sector to continue to grow and support that economic recovery.
In closing, there are a couple of brief things I'd like to say. I'd like to offer our advice and perspective on what Canada can do to support that future growth and help the sector contribute to the economy.
First, it's essential for the Government of Canada to embrace the investment growth potential of the sector. Mr. Chairman, you've heard me characterize it in the past. It's been somewhat ambivalent. It needs to be enthusiastic. We need to be enthusiastic about the growth prospects of Canada's chemistry sector.
In particular. we would call on the federal government to bring forward the spirit of collaboration. We've seen through this health crisis the way the federal and provincial governments have worked so closely together to define the right roles and to take the right actions in an expeditious manner. We need to do the same thing with the economic recovery. We can't have the provinces rowing in one direction and the federal government in another. We have to see that coordinated response. If we can achieve that, it will be fantastic. That's the key thing we see. We want to see the federal government as enthusiastic as the provinces are about the growth opportunities in this sector.
Second and finally, I think we agree that our industry owns the issue of plastic waste. We have to solve that. We accept the federal government's agenda of what they wish to do, but I will assure you, if you want to convey a message to the global chemistry industry and plastics industry that you are ambivalent about its resilience, its responsibility, its responsiveness, and its investment growth prospects, go ahead and declare plastics toxic under CEPA as the means to regulate those. After what we've seen in this crisis, that will be a message to the sector that you don't really want the investment.
We think there are other tools you could use. We support the entire agenda, the actions the government wishes to take. We just urge you to use a regulatory tool other than declaring these necessary, sanitary and safe products toxic. We don't think Canadians support doing that. We as an association certainly don't support it.
I look forward to your questions.
Thank you again, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to speak.