It's fortunate that this could be an efficiency for our country for investment if we do it right and do it quickly.
I want to move to Mr. Paterson with regard to one of your suggestions about a scrappage fee. We've talked in the past about this.
I've long advocated a national auto strategy. I believe that it's important for our national security as much as it is for innovation in the sector. We have just underperformed as a country. You can't look at the plant expansions happening across the globe and look at Canada. I'm across from Detroit, Michigan, here. They're up to $8 billion in investment in Detroit alone. Our government has only secured $6 billion in the last five years.
That needs to change, in my opinion. I've seen, Mr. Walker, your work at CAPC. It is far from the days of the robust CAPC in my opinion, quite frankly, when it was more of an activist base that had working groups that followed through on a regular basis. There's terrific work. I follow it all the time, and I thank you for that work.
We know in the past we had the ecoAuto “feebate”. That was when Toyota took the safety bags out of the back seat to get the gas mileage to go up and got $1,000. That was about 10 years ago. They got a lot of that money. Most recently, we have a government program that left off the only domestically produced hybrid vehicle, the Chrysler, and the full electric vehicle here in Windsor, which we had to fix.
How could we tailor-make a scrappage program to more domestic needs? I'll be quite frank that I don't want to do an incentive to have people buy foreign vehicles that don't have any connection to North American manufacturing right now.