Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am going to make my comments in English, but then I will be pleased to answer questions in French or English.
I want to thank the committee for beginning this process of looking at the service industry. I think it's very timely and very welcome.
Our perspective for the information and communication technology industry is a bit unique, because we have the perspective of what's happening in our own sector and a unique perspective on what's happening in the economy as a whole. In our industry, we have about 600,000 jobs at the present time, but in addition to that, there are about 500,000 information and communications technology workers who work in the rest of the economy and drive our productivity in the economy.
There are numerous macroeconomic studies that show that, today, productivity in a country's economy comes from deployment of information and communications technology. StatsCan just published another study yesterday, on a microeconomic basis, studying the performance of firms that had used ICT versus those that had not, and the studies demonstrate superior performance. So we see technology spreading throughout the economy and being necessary for the productivity of businesses, as well as public services, and we have witnessed the shift of the economy from one of manufacturing of products and extraction of natural resources to a services economy, and that's also true in our own segment.
In ICT, until about the year 2000, the revenues from manufacturing, services, and wholesale were proceeding at about the same pace. Indeed, manufacturing actually peaked and was growing faster than the others until that time, although employment was already beginning at that time to exceed in the services sector what it was in the manufacturing sector.
Since the year 2000, there has been a divergence, with services really driving the entire growth in our industry, and that's probably a sign of what's happening in the economy generally. The result has been that even though on the manufacturing side we've had a dip in revenues and employment, on both counts, both revenues and employment, our industry has continued to outpace the growth of the economy. We find ourselves hiring and employing more people today—and that has been true now for a couple of years—than at our peak, the peak of the bubble.
So our industry, like our economy, is shifting to services. One of the ways I can illustrate that is that the microelectronics industry, which makes the chips that go into all kinds of products nowadays, has shifted from companies or operations that are completely integrated, down to fabricating their own chips. Other than the plants in Bromont, in Canada, there aren't too many of those left. Most of the work now is for fabricationless semiconductor or microelectronics companies, and even chipless, where the work is essentially design and marketing, and so on, and not the fabrication of the actual product.
Our industry, like the rest of the economy, is shifting not only to a services economy but to a knowledge-based economy. We all know that. The knowledge-based economy is subject to the same forces as the manufacturing part of the economy and many other sectors, with the forces of globalization and the pressure from the drop in the U.S. dollar. Many other countries tried to go for the key jobs in this area. Our future as a developed economy, with an advanced system of education, a high quality of life, and being closest to what is still the richest market in the world is going to be based on knowledge and on leadership.
We will not succeed by being me-too. We can't compete on cost with countries like India or China, which graduate more engineers or PhDs every year than we have in our entire base. We can only compete by picking the leading-edge things where we can be faster or closer to the market and better with the new thing that will succeed in the marketplace.
As I said, we're subject to the same challenges as other sectors, and I think it's extremely timely for this committee to look at that, because these jobs are our future. We should pursue our advantages with intensity and tackle the challenges we have. We have talent challenges, as Mark mentioned.
We also have challenges for our entire R and D sector, which is really at the hub of the entire ecosystem on which our knowledge economy is based. So we are very happy the government is reviewing the SR&ED tax credit at the present time, because that program, as it turns out, simply does not count for many of our major investors in labs when they're making their investment decisions. We need to have all of those credits become refundable. At the moment they're only refundable for a small portion of smaller companies financed in a certain way. I would compare that with saying we want to attract auto plants in Canada, but we will put all our efforts on small plants and we won't try as hard for big plants, or our program won't work for big plants and we're not going to tackle those.
Those are the kinds of issues our industry and the knowledge economy face in Canada.
I thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I would be happy to continue the discussion.