To your first point, Mr. McTeague, the situation is urgent, and we have been calling on the government to implement all the recommendations in the report. I think they were all extremely good, from the tax recommendations to the issues of ensuring fair trade, borders, logistics--everything. The problem with the dollar has just made implementation all that much more urgent. And I want to say again, on the record, that this is urgent, and we are calling on the government for full implementation of the recommendations.
In terms of the impact this is having on companies, I think there are two ways companies have been trying to hedge. The first is by establishing some form of natural hedge, so they're looking at opportunities to outsource more, to import more of their components and raw materials. Many are trying to establish production facilities in other markets, such as in the United States, where they'll have direct access to the market and where they'll be able to take some of the edge off the export side. All of that natural hedging may be good for an individual business, but from the economic point of view, there's not much of an economic benefit in taking your suppliers and offshoring those suppliers to the United States or any other country. So the overall economic impact of that type of hedging is a negative one.
If you look at financial hedging, in our membership and in Canadian manufacturing, 90% of these companies are small and mid-sized companies. Sixty percent of these companies have fewer than a hundred employees. We expect small businesses to be financially expert in terms of export and market development, expert in terms of engineering and product management and operations improvement. They don't have the capabilities as small companies to do that.
The larger companies, of course, are hedging. Many of the mid-sized companies are hedging. But even for the large companies, if you hedged at par in February, and you're getting paid in a contract when the dollar is at $1.10, you're still making a loss of 10%. And nobody could have forecast the dollar rising that rapidly.