Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for being here, Mr. Minister.
First of all, I really appreciate your recognition of workers. It's important that you do that. You've done that not just here at this committee; I've also seen you do that in public statements and so forth. Coming from a union environment myself, where the workers negotiate the work and are sitting down at the table.... We can support through public policy, but the skill set is there.
I really appreciate that. Some people like to take victory laps when things happen, and we should be focused on that and being attractive to the United States as well, fighting back on our auto jobs. I give you credit: We're on offence on auto for the first time in the 20-plus years I've been here. I appreciate that, because usually we're having to come and mop up a spill over something else. I do appreciate that.
I want to ask, though, about one thing I'm concerned about in the recent announcement. It's not the announcement itself, but we might have workers who can't afford the vehicles they're making. It's similar to the people working in the grocery stores who can't afford certain things that are on the shelves they are stocking.
The United States has incentives for electric vehicles at $7,500 U.S., which translates to probably $30,000 Canadian. No, I'm kidding. It's not $30,000 Canadian. It's probably about $10,000. So we have ours at $5,000. On top of that, they have a used incentive for $4,000. They're going to be very assertively getting the vehicles into the market.
It seems that we always have money for the companies and the corporations, but we don't have in the province of Ontario any subsidy in terms of an incentive for electric vehicle purchasing. Ontario has abandoned that policy. Ironically, the minivan made in Windsor can get upwards of $15,000 to $20,000 bought in the U.S., depending on where you buy it, whereas in Canada you can get only $5,000. I've called for some reciprocity. We've talked about reciprocity in the auto sector, from bumpers to everything else. Do you have any thoughts on that? I've asked for this government to look at some sort of reciprocity for Canadian consumers.
Lastly, just to summarize, with the U.S. having a $4,000 incentive to buy used, we could actually have a business, a cottage industry business, of shipping electric vehicles that are used out of Canada into the United States, lowering our target margins that we're trying to reach, because they'll be able to get incentives on the vehicles that are in the used market. Used vehicles are traded back and forth along the border on a regular basis. They will have a $4,000 U.S. incentive, which is probably about $6,000 Canadian. We could actually be losing some of our threshold target markets.