Thank you.
Hello, everybody.
I sent a letter but I'm not going to read it all. I just want to hit the high points.
My name is Don Walker. I am the chief executive officer of Magna. I first started in 1994, so Magna, most of our management team and I went through the 2008-09 downturn, and we've taken a lot of the lessons learned from that.
We employ about 20,000 people in Canada out of our 160,000 people worldwide who operate in 27 countries.
When this first started, we almost immediately implemented our own travel bans, stopping people from coming in from China, which helped a lot. We've also asked people to quarantine.
We've been working on PPE. We've donated over 500,000 KN95 masks to Ontario, and we helped them source another million. That is coming out of China, and I think we can get more. We've also been involved in producing face shields, masks, ventilators, gowns, etc.
I won't repeat everything Dave just said because it's probably very similar. From a health and safety standpoint, which is our primary concern here, the automotive industry has worked really well together across North America and has taken lessons learned from operations and everybody, including ourselves. In China, they're back up and running. Europe has been back up and running. We've been sharing best practices there, so we have a very extensive playbook, probably very similar to that of General Motors because it was developed with everybody doing the same thing, which I think is critical to make sure we get the industry restarted safely and stay going.
We have had fewer than 150 employees test positive out of our 160,000. None of those, we believe, came from a spread in the workplace, but we contact trace in every case.
As an example of a large corporation, this had a $1.- billion sales impact for us in the first quarter. It will be much bigger in the second quarter. In the first quarter it cost us over a quarter of a billion dollars, so it's a big strain.
We've been taking advantage of various government programs around the world. Some of them are a little difficult to follow, getting the details right, but we have been tracking that globally and we've been trying to support our employees.
I'll make this quick because Dave already said a couple of these things. We need to get the auto industry back up and running and stay running. If we shut it down again, we probably will not re-emerge for months and we'll have unbelievable damage to the supply base and the liquidity will dry up, so it has to stay running.
That means we need to get the dealerships open and hopefully people will start buying vehicles, which ultimately supports the industry. Dave mentioned the scrappage program, which would be very good to incentivize people to buy new vehicles and get the worst movers off the roads.
There has also been a suggestion for a tax holiday for potentially the HST or the GST on new car purchases for, say, a six-month period. I think we need to be aligning ourselves with the U.S. on everything we do, whether it's regulations or going back to work because it's a very interconnected industry.
As for what's going to be the new normal, we've had thousands of people working from home. We also look at how this industry will be hit by delivery of products and services now that everybody is ordering online. We can maybe get into this in the Qs and As. I think the government has responded well in a very difficult situation, trying to figure out what to do. I'm sure as we look back we'll have a lot of lessons learned.
I think we need to get off government programs as soon as is practicable because we need to incentivize people to go back to work unless they're compromised. I am very concerned about what's going to happen with the government deficits, debt, interest rates, trade policy, etc., and I'll be getting into some of that in the Qs and As.
Getting us all back to work is going to be very interesting. I think Canada needs to be focused on how to maintain ourselves as a healthy country fiscally going forward.
Thanks.