Thank you, Chairman.
I think I've met just about all of the committee people here. I'm happy to be here today too. I haven't appeared before this committee, although I think Jacques Lamarre, our president, did on the last five-year review of EDC. EDC is a very important partner of ours.
I thought in my opening remarks today I would just tell you very briefly a little bit about what SNC-Lavalin is. Quite often people think we make airplanes, because they've heard of Bombardier. Sometimes we work with them, but we don't make airplanes.
The second thing I wanted to focus on specifically is the things the service sector needs, from our point of view, to remain competitive in Canada and internationally. The things we need are a competitive tax system, a reliable and supportive regulatory environment, strategic partnerships in a number of sectors--nuclear would be a good example of that--and outsourcing. And for exports of services, which Steve has talked about, we need positive foreign relations in key markets and supportive export institutions: EDC we've heard about, and Foreign Affairs and International Trade, CIDA--it would be nice to work with CIDA more--and the Canadian Commercial Corporation. Those are the things we need.
Who are we? Well, we're among the top five engineering construction companies in the world. We specialize in public and industrial infrastructure, heavily into power, including nuclear; right now, the huge boom in mining and metals; transportation; chemicals and petroleum; general engineering; pharmaceuticals; and facilities management. We have projects in over 100 countries. We're carrying the Canadian flag to a lot of places it isn't seen very much.
As Steve said, traditionally half of our revenues are from outside North America. In 2006 our revenues were $5.2 billion. We don't have full numbers for 2007 yet, but by the end of the third quarter we were just half a billion below our 2006 numbers. So we'll certainly reach last year's numbers and more.
The interesting thing is we look like a services company, but in fact we mobilize Canadian SMEs wherever we go. I just checked where we're building a 1,200-megawatt power plant in Algeria right now called the Hadjret Ennous. We're taking 24 Canadian suppliers of goods and services with us, some manufacturers, some other service companies. We're building a $2 billion nickel mine in Madagascar for Sherritt. We have 80 Canadian suppliers that we're taking with us. So we're putting together Canadian skills and manufacturers.
Typically, in an aluminum plant--and we build most of the aluminum plants around the world; not all, but most--we take around 30 Canadian suppliers. We're also using the best local supply we can and local labour as well. We have to, to be competitive. But we're constantly taking Canadian companies on the road with us. We do that in Canada too.
We mobilize pension funds. When we put together the group that built the 407, we used Quebec pension funds as part of the financing. We bought most of the transmission system in Alberta and operate it, and we mobilized Ontario teachers' pension funds to do that, along with our own. So we're taking some of the huge pools of pension money and mobilizing them for infrastructure purposes. We are increasingly owning and operating parts of infrastructure. We're going to run the power plant I talked about in Algeria for 30 years, and we own about a quarter of it. We will operate the light rail system, the Canada Line, in Vancouver, and own and operate a good part of it for 30 years. We're providing service to about 65 naval vessels around the country. We manage federal buildings. That's the direction we're going in.
I'll talk about taxation. We say the services sector is one of the key sectors for Canada's future, and it's totally exposed to global competition. It isn't like oil or resources, where we have a strategic advantage because that's where we are. We're totally exposed to competition. So we need a competitive tax rate. In fact, our corporate tax rate is higher than most of our OECD competitors', and that's true even after the phased reductions kick in. So that's a big problem.
We don't have tax treaties with enough countries, so we're sometimes exposed to double taxation, and we pay more, we think, on our foreign earnings than we should.
And finally, for our people working abroad, the personal income tax treatment is always a problem. It's complicated to get authority to be taxed at the out-of-Canada rate, and the treatment of allowances for people who are abroad.... There are all kinds of little tax issues like that that I can go into later, if you want.
Regulation. We need more regulatory certainty and efficiency. Part of the problem is, in the environment area, we need better federal-provincial coordination. There have been improvements there, and we're hoping the new federal Major Projects Management Office that NRCan is funding will help that.
We have no problem with regulation. We cooperate fully with regulators, but we want them to have the resources to do their job in a time that's predictable and in ways that when you're doing a big project, you can see what your track is, so it's not just an open-ended wait.
Strategic partnerships. More and more infrastructure is being built through strategic partnerships, and this has helped create competitive firms internationally. One of the things that made us competitive internationally was the Quebec government insisting that a Canadian company be involved in the James Bay project, so we were loaded onto Bechtel, which otherwise would have done it all by itself. That gave us the experience in managing complex projects, and now we're doing them all over the world.
CIDA. Back in the 60s and 70s, working with CIDA put us into the African market. It wouldn't happen anymore; CIDA doesn't do that anymore. We need a strong federal partnership on CANDU sales internationally. Nuclear sales are highly political. The French president and the American president and the German people, politicians when they travel...they're not doing it for technical reasons, they're doing it to be there with their companies.
When we're looking for export of services, there's not much difference in most markets between the political and the personal and the economic. We need to have all three there. We need networks. We need people on the ground. We need Canadian export support services to be there and coordinated. And it's not the money. We're not going around with our hands out. We want Canada to be there with us. They need to have the Canadian flag on some of the things we're doing internationally.
I'll stop there.