I would also say that the NAFTA offers Canadian manufacturers and exporters tremendous opportunity and protection within the North American economy, but it doesn't cover everything here. From the point of view of the threat of opening up NAFTA, whether that would change our level of safeguard within North America, then that news is good. Keep in mind, 50% of what is manufactured in Canada is exported into or through the United States. Everything that manufacturers did over the last 15 years to succeed in the U.S. market is now coming to haunt them because of the economic difficulty in the United States.
There are four areas I am particularly concerned about in our relationship with the United States. The first is Buy American provisions that cover all iron, steel, and all manufactured products and were written into the American Recovery Act. This is only $80 billion of procurement opportunity. Although the Senate amendment has said that the U.S. would meet its international trade obligations, the fact of the matter is that most of that money is spent at state and local levels, in which we do not have any safeguard under the NAFTA. Because we're not signatory to the general procurement agreement, we don't have any safeguard at the state level. Even the Europeans who have signed the GPA and can take advantage of the procurement of 37 states don't have the access into municipal procurement. The federal legislation in the United States Recovery Act really expanded the restriction on Buy American.
The problem now is that we're seeing the very same wording being written into appropriation bills. We understand that congressional leaders have instructed their staff to write this into appropriation bills. We could very well see the same Buy American provisions appearing in the energy act, the housing act, the transportation act, the highways act going forward. This federal money that is being spent at state and local levels is not covered by NAFTA. The clean water technology sector saw the United States as a major market. I was with five companies here in Ottawa last week because they're now being effectively shut out of the U.S. market because the Buy American provisions have been written into the clean water appropriations bill. So Buy American is a big challenge.
The second challenge is export controls, and particularly the ability of Canadian companies to hire Canadian nationals or people with dual nationality here to work on technologies. That's a huge issue. It is another example of protection.
At the border, more and more regulations are slowing the border process. It's not just customs and security regulations, although there's a lot of that too. It's the fact that we administer 137 statutes and the U.S. administers 97 statutes at the border, all with different regulations here. The lack of harmonization is now.... When the United States is focusing on enforcement, this becomes a major source of compliance costs and time delay in moving product across the border.
We're just as bad as the Americans are. CBSA is proposing to have importers declare the source of the product, the tariff code of the product, whether the product is a health and safety risk, whether the product has been fumigated. These are things they're asking importers to declare from a manufacturing exporter. You're asking your customer to declare this information. If they can't declare that information correctly, they face huge fines from CBSA. After trying to convince American border authorities not to do this in the United States, the fact that CBSA is even contemplating this in Canada just frankly sends shivers up the spine of anybody doing business across the border. So we have our own act to get together here on border issues.
The most recent indication of the challenges we'll face in the future is U.S. EPA regulations affecting greenhouse gases. If Canadian companies are expected to report GHG content, or to do a detailed accounting on energy going across the border, this will add another layer of cost and another layer of delay. Frankly, if you are a company looking at putting a production facility in North America, where would you put it, given all the problems in getting into the U.S. market today? It is already beginning to have an impact on where companies locate production and investment. None of these problems falls within the current rules of the NAFTA.
To answer your question, yes, it's good they're not going to reopen the NAFTA, but we have to do a lot more, working with the Americans, to make sure we have a commercial relationship that works well between the two countries.