The auto industry is still Canada's most important export industry. Every day 148,000 Canadians go to work in the auto sector. They build more than 7,000 vehicles every day. They produce $290 million worth of products. They earn $26 million, and pay $6.3 million in income and property taxes.
We've had a mixture of both good news and bad news in this critical sector. Thanks largely to proactive measures by the federal and Ontario governments, we've won at least $7 billion in new major investment projects in the last three years, and this is essential to keep us in the ball game.
However, there are disturbing negative trends as well. The dollar, the problems at the Canada-U.S. border, rising energy costs, and structural problems at both Ford and General Motors, by far the largest auto companies in Canada, have all hammered this sector.
Despite these investment announcements, overall employment has been heading downward, and the forecasts are it will continue to decline over the next period of time. The assembly sector has a net loss of 8,000 jobs since peaking in 1998. The parts sector is currently experiencing the worst pain, losing 10,000 jobs since 2003, again largely because of the rising dollar. And it's not just the old unionized companies that are feeling the brunt. It's happening all across the sector. And as Bill indicated, the order books going forward make it appear even worse down the road, because you don't just remove that tooling as soon as the dollar rises. Unless something is done very, very soon, we are going to see at least 10,000 more jobs lost in the auto parts sector in the coming years.
We'd also like to draw your attention to one other urgent matter. At this very moment when manufacturing, and the auto industry in particular, needs all possible support from government, the federal government is charging ahead to negotiate a free trade agreement with Korea. Our negotiators want an agreement by the end of this year, and there are no major sectors in the Canadian economy that see the Korean market as a major opportunity. Many sectors are opposed.
The auto industry---not just the big three, but Toyota, Honda, the parts industry as well, and CAW---have all expressed our opposition to this deal. I think the committee heard recently from Jayson Myers of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, who expressed a similar viewpoint.
Our trade with Korea is already one-sided. Since Korea's financial crisis in 1997, its exports to us are up 90%. Its auto exports to us are up an incredible 600%. For every dollar's worth of automotive products we sell in Korea, it sells $150 here in Canada. It is blatantly unfair and has already destroyed thousands of Canadian jobs. The Korean government has used exports as a source of growth for its economy, and we cannot allow this one-sided relationship to continue; free trade with Korea will make it worse.
Korean imports are tightly controlled through a range of measures, including macro-economic tools, currency management, non-tariff barriers, and fierce national loyalty. No one seriously believes our exports to Korea, which are mostly resource-based products, will increase under free trade, yet it will use tariff elimination in the context of our more transparent market to substantially expand its sales to our market.