Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and I want to thank the guests for being here.
It's a particularly important topic for me as the member of Parliament for Oshawa. We recently had a layoff at our truck plant; there were 1,200 job losses. It's disheartening, because I see the numbers in Canada, and it appears Canadians are buying more trucks: truck sales were up 14% last year, and I see in the new numbers that Chrysler sales are up in Canada this year.
To what extent are these 300,000 job losses due to the fact that much of our exports in this country go to the United States, where we're seeing an American economy that's really being challenged right now? Are our sales directly being affected by the U.S?