That's right. It's taxed in the first year you receive it, in which case, when you expected x dollars, you're not really getting x dollars. You're getting x dollars minus whatever tax rate applies. You're not getting the full benefit of the fund or the loan, which is why we're saying that it should not be taxed. Other jurisdictions are not taxing those incentives.
It should be more of a grant structure, and that grant structure should not be kept to the 20% threshold. It should be upwards of 50% plus. Take a look at why Tennessee got the Volkswagen plant. On a $1 billion investment, they got roughly $540 million in incentives. That's $540 million on a $1 billion project by various means, in all various means.
We have to look at how we close the gap. That's one reason that we've seen an exodus—not our fair share is a better way to put it—of new investment. Out of the roughly $18 billion in new investment over the last few years, $10 billion went to the U.S., $8 billion went to Mexico, and we got $1 billion here in Canada. That's not including the most recent announcements and so forth.
It's that, and then it's the cost of doing business. This is where, again, the federal-provincial approach here to new investment decisions or in support of new investment decisions is really critical.
In Ontario, for instance, the cost of electricity was mentioned. We are high users of electricity, and we're very flat in the sense that we don't have the ability to go to off-peak hours. We have to maximize the capacity utilization of our plants. We don't have the ability, for instance, to go to off-peak hours and reduce our global adjustment cost, so we're seeing costs upwards of two to three times higher in Ontario versus our competing jurisdictions. More roughly, on average, that's about a difference of $42 per megawatt hour versus our benchmark plants in the United States. That's one of the issues that also goes into the equation here.
There are also the costs of other regulatory issues and the complexities. These are all things that add to the cost of doing business. It's the multitude of those things that actually affect and influence a decision to invest here or not. Most recently, we've seen “or not” apply.