I'd be happy to start.
Echoing the comments that have been made, the financing is a tremendous challenge.
I'm using the adjective “tremendous”; you were asking if this is a crisis. This is definitely a crisis. It's not a typical downswing; this is not a pattern that's been repeated previously, such that we can predict how we're going to come out of it. This is definitely a crisis situation, and we stand to lose our manufacturing prowess if we don't deal with it in a very quick manner.
What can be done? We use the banks, as has been said, to finance doing business. The debt-to-equity ratios, the different covenants we're held to, are impossible for us to satisfy with the demands our customers are putting on us. The level playing field is not something we expect the government to be able to straighten out for us, but we expect it rather to assist us in straightening out ourselves.
We are being asked.... In fact, this is one of the reasons why Bernard Mould, although we were prospering and were turning a profit, could not go on financing the large automotive companies. We had a large Magna program that we had just landed. Payment was based on 45 days after PPAP—you've heard the term PPAP, production part approval process—and PPAP was scheduled to occur next April 8, which means that sometime in the middle of June we would be getting paid, if we got paid on time.
This means that our first tryouts on these tools were to be in the middle of December—next month, a month from now—and then we'd be carrying that financing cost for a year and a half. That's impossible for a company that's only doing between $5 million and $10 million a year in sales.
If the banks could somehow be guaranteed by the government—and EDC comes very close to being able to do it, but it's still not good enough in meeting the covenant—if there were some way the government could assure the banks that the manufacturing companies could work with different debt-to-equity ratios or different financing, that would work.