Thank you for inviting me to be part of this process. I certainly welcome you to the west. Certainly, people who have grown up in the core of Canada understand manufacturing in a slightly different way. Our company is actually involved in that type of manufacturing.
We produce products for the automotive industry, and specifically for heavy trucks and trailers. Our focus has been, for most of the 36-odd years that I've been part of the company, to be a leading-edge player working solidly in R and D and transferring that research and development into the actual marketplace. We're trying to connect those two ends of the dumbbell. I sometimes wonder whether maybe that term could be applied a little more accurately.
We have about 10% of our business in China today, and that takes me to China quite regularly. It's very important that we continue to benchmark ourselves against global competitors in our industry. One of those benchmarks that I bring home from time to time is a set of the knock-off, counterfeit golf clubs. If you watch the development of golf clubs in the little stores in Shanghai or Shenjen or Beijing, you will see how quickly they evolve from being a copycat to something that is incredibly good. I found that out very recently as I tried out a new set of $150 PING G2s. I shot the best game of my summer with these clubs. If you think about it, that set is about a $2,500 product here in North America, but you can buy it at any golf store in the back alleys of Shanghai for $150, as I said, complete with travel bag, golf bag, a dozen balls, and probably a shirt and a cap, and away you go. And it could cost you an extra $25 for shoes. I bring these back and show them to our people. But this is what we are facing today.
If we look at the importance of manufacturing in Canada, it makes up almost one-fifth of our economy. Certainly, for every dollar that we generate, we're talking about another three-dollar multiplier. It gets tougher and tougher each day, so that today we're up to about seven hours and 50 minutes out of an eight-hour day before we start generating any profits.
Throw into that mix the job situation in Alberta, where the least little thing can annoy somebody and send them packing, looking for a new job. That makes it difficult to continue being globally competitive here in Alberta particularly, but in Canada in general. If we think about the $100-plus billion in new projects that are planned for Alberta, and a 3% unemployment rate—by the way, about 1.6% is the unemployment rate for male Albertans—we certainly are scrounging for more help in whatever we do.
We've lived with a tax policy in Canada that was geared toward job creation through most of the last twenty-odd years. If we look at our manufacturing shipments, we had a phenomenal run back in the nineties, when we grew at an incredible rate. Of course, the recession that was subsequently followed by 9/11 took a lot of the edge off of that. We did pick things back up in the last two or three years, but we're not doing it profitably. We're not leaving enough money for reinvestment.
Here in Alberta in particular, we desperately need reinvestment in things like automation technology enhancement. If we are going to remain competitive after the edge comes off of this energy boom, we must work hard to get more from our people. If you look at Canadians as a whole, we're running about $6,000 per year behind the Americans in terms of per capita GDP. There isn't a hell of a lot of room left for us to squeeze out of our internal systems without huge reinvestment.
Being an entrepreneur, I listened to some of the previous presenters and I think about some of the work we've done with the Alberta Research Council to be one of the first companies to implement robotics in roll forging. I relate well to Peter Ouellette's comments about bringing in leading technology. Together, our two firms took automotive tread worth about $50 a tonne, and using Alberta natural gas and electricity, we converted that at the mill here in Edmonton so that it was worth $500 to $600 a tonne. We loaded it onto Alberta trucks, shipped it to Calgary, and converted it again to a product worth $1,200 to $2,000 a tonne.
But we can no longer do that. We need help. We need more money left with us to put into R and D, capital expenditures, education, and skill development. Give us something back in our taxation policy that changes the focus from job creation to job preservation.
Thank you.