I'll try to take those in order.
Yes, the investment in R and D is an issue of concern for us. This industry is investing a little over $1 billion a year in R and D on an annual basis, and it's been investing that amount for about 10 years; it hasn't changed. At a time when the industry has grown more than twice as large, our R and D intensity, as we would describe it, has gone from about roughly 10% a little over a decade ago to about 5% today.
That's not an investment rate at which you're going to sustain this industry and growth in the industry. It's a trouble spot for us and was clearly one of the major issues that surfaced in the work of the Canadian Aerospace Partnership last year, and one of the issues that was addressed in the aerospace and defence strategic framework, which we, as an industry, unanimously endorse.
The challenge—and I want to go back to the beginning of my remarks—is that we compete around the world for that investment. What that tells me is that our investment environment and investment climate in Canada is less competitive than in other locations. We're seeing companies choose to invest and develop aerospace businesses outside Canada as opposed to doing it inside Canada. They're using and leveraging the knowledge and investment they have now and will continue to do that for some period of time.
Our success in the past and our success today—and thank you very much for the congratulations—is no guarantee of future success unless we continue to stimulate higher levels of investment. Risk-sharing and the role of government and how we work together are important parts of creating that positive investment climate that will make us compete.
One of the things those sales numbers disguise, to a certain extent, is that while we have grown our overall revenue, the Canadian value-added in that revenue has been decreasing. That's because the top-line revenue has been growing, but we've been sourcing more and more from outside Canada because of competitiveness issues. Whether they are foreign-owned subsidiaries here in Canada or some of our own homegrown companies, as they try to maintain their competitiveness globally, they ultimately look for where they can work best to be competitive.
I'll skip down to procurement, and then I'll come back to skills.
Procurement is clearly an important tool, and it's distressing to us, as we look at procurement over the last number of years in Canada, that many Canadian firms--world-class, market-proven, with cost-competitive technology and product capabilities--are overlooked by our own Department of National Defence. They have this eagerness to see anything foreign and yet are very slow to recognize that we have world-class capabilities here in Canada. We need to see a greater predisposition to Canadian solutions.
That's not to say we should have broad buy-Canadian policies that emulate what our friends south of the border are doing. But we really do need to look at how we can better use the capabilities and better stimulate and strengthen those capabilities through either a first-use demonstration or through looking at how we can build Canadian solutions into the legitimate procurement needs of our Department of National Defence. That's clearly an issue.