Thank you very much. I'm very glad to hear that your family was involved in this industry and it's in your blood. Sometimes it can get very difficult. It's in your blood, and that's why I'm here today.
We recently built ferries in Germany, as I mentioned in my evidence. BC Ferries spent close to $1 billion in Germany. They had one company, which was a large multinational on the west coast, that wanted to build them. They tried to have BC Ferries build them here and they would not do it. They went to a company in Germany that has been heavily supported by the government over the last 20 years. Germany looked at rationalizing the industry 20 or 30 years ago, and I think we're almost in that kind of a state now, or we're not going to have an industry at all.
Small and medium-sized enterprises are the innovators, and what we need, what we don't have, is this cooperation among everybody in the industry and in the government to try to create an industry here that is going to be here 30 years from now. Germany did that 20 to 30 years ago, and the result is that Canada is buying ferries from Germany. Canada is a maritime nation, with over 40 ferries in British Columbia alone, just in the B.C. ferry fleet. They also have highway ferries. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland all have ferries. You have ships plying the Great Lakes waters, yet we build not one of them.
Government procurement needs to be part of that solution, and we need to target those types of vessels that the government wants, and produce vessels, so that 30 years from now we have people working in this industry producing very high-value vessels to the international markets. We can do this. We have a large tug and barge industry on both coasts; we are producing tugs on the east coast for the world market.
With government assistance and with the government will to get this industry to sit down...as opposed to having small to medium-sized enterprises fighting with the multinationals, we should be cooperating to try to produce an industry. Government procurement, by giving the work to multinationals, is hampering our ability to compete worldwide. We need to look at the shipyard industry being supported from an infrastructure point of view, from a research and development point of view, and the government needs to look at this as creating an industry, as we are a large maritime nation. We need to realize that.