Thank you, gentlemen, for being here.
It's an interesting process we've gone through to get here.
I represent Windsor West, which is the automotive capital of Canada, across from Detroit, Michigan. We have very much integrated economies with the United States. What's interesting is that one of the reasons we have the auto sector is that we were bicycle manufacturers. When Henry Ford built the car, they looked for people who could weld, understood gears, and so forth. That's where the automotive industry became proficient. Detroit and that area is also now becoming a cycling industry again, as well as maintaining auto.
The point I'm getting at is that for innovation and for the investment we make as taxpayers through subsidization of education, subsidization of grants, subsidization of, even later on, tax incentives such as our SR and ED tax credits, and so forth, there is the eternal frustration at the end of the day, in a riding such as mine where tool and die and mould making, for example, is the best in the world, of eventually having to end up being a fixer of Canadian technology that has now been transplanted to China, or even to South Korea, versus the products that we actually could have been manufacturing at home.
Mr. Hinton, I'll let you start with regard to this issue. For me, at the end of the day, I want the manufacturing jobs to be part of the process. I believe that also is where further innovation takes place. I don't think it all takes place on a computer screen; it also takes place on the shop floor, where people are actually hands on, doing the work with the product and finding different ways to use it. My eternal frustration is doing the front-loading of it, and then it isn't transferred to good, sustainable jobs in which Canadians have made their own personal financial investments by going to college or university.
With that, we've undermined even some of our own Canadian innovation by subsidizing products that are manufactured elsewhere, which then compete against Canadian products that were doing quite fine in the market.
Do you have any suggestions on how we get around this and how we perhaps do more enforcement with regard to our expectations? We signed treaties about IP, intellectual property rights, with countries that regularly abuse those things, and we're pressured to do more. Canada is seen as an outlier in many respects; meanwhile, some of those countries in the world habitually have industries with state government support, either direct or indirect, and non-tariff barriers that make it even more complicated for Canadians who just want to make a better widget and produce it in their own community.