Thank you so much, MP Gould. It's good to see you again as well.
First of all, when it comes to derivatives, we're happy there is a broad recognition in Ottawa that there is far greater breadth and depth to the Canadian steel industry than just the primary production of steel. That's a big, important part of the economy for my hometown of Hamilton and your hometown of Burlington as well. Just in structural steel—and there are far more derivative steel fabricators and manufacturers in this country—we employ 30,000 people across Canada, so we really appreciate the extension of the protections of the Canadian steel industry, down through the value chain to the derivative industries.
What we're seeing, however, is pricing right now that is far below that, particularly coming from China. I'm not trying to be xenophobic here. This is not about that. It's just the whole situation, and the reason for the 232 tariffs in the U.S. is the over-capacity of production in China. What we're seeing and what I'm hearing is that we would need a derivative surtax of 300% to put us on an even playing [Technical difficulties—Editor] steel.
It's important to recognize that, yes, we have to protect our free trade agreement [Technical difficulties—Editor] and the 25% does a really good job of putting us on a level playing field there, but it is not the case when it comes to one country in particular. More needs to be done there.
When it comes to domestic procurement, as I said, right now it only applies to situations in which the federal government is the procurement agency. In the grand scheme of things, the federal government only purchases a small amount of steel compared to the provincial governments and the municipal governments. The federal government provides a lot of funding to projects in our provinces and our municipalities. I think it would be easy to leverage in the funding agreements the requirement to buy Canada. That shouldn't mean that municipalities and provinces are going to be paying more.
The other note is that all the—