Thanks, Mr. Chairman. I'll try to observe your admonition. I'm duly warned.
SNC-Lavalin, as many people know, is one of the world's largest engineering companies. We work in 100 countries right now, and probably 125 in the last five years. Last year we did $6.1 billion worth of business. We have 22,000 employees worldwide, and last year $305 million of our business—5% of our revenues—was in Latin America. Just out of interest, only 4% of our business is in the United States. So I think we're probably one of the most diversified and international Canadian companies around, other than probably some IT firms that seem to do most of their business outside the country.
In Latin America we have operating bases already in Peru and in Chile, mainly in the mining business, and in Brazil, where we've been working hard to establish a credible footprint in the mining and power sectors and where we have about 1,600 employees right now. We have worked in Colombia since 1971. We did a number of smaller projects in the power, chemicals, petroleum, and agricultural and industrial sectors, and finally opened a full-time office there in 1994—more of a representative office than an operating office—and worked fairly actively there until 1999, when we found the situation wasn't safe enough for us to work there any more.
So we left Colombia and didn't do anything there between 1999 and 2007, but in 2007 we felt that the situation had improved enough from the point of view of our safety and the business to be done there that we re-established ourselves in Colombia. Since then, through organic growth, we have built a workforce of 160 people there. We have two projects there right now. They're not huge projects. One is in the oil and gas area and the other in the mining sector. We are also interested in other sectors of work in Colombia beyond oil and gas and mining, sectors such as power and other sorts of infrastructure, including highways, water, and what have you, and we are prepared to provide engineering services or engineering procurement and construction services in those sectors.
As a matter of fact, we are now looking at Colombia as our centre for construction in Latin America. It would work with our other offices around Latin America on major construction projects. We think there is a strong enough local workforce there. I would mention in passing that as we travel around the world we don't take a lot of Canadians with us. We stress the use of local people, local businesses, and local labour to do our projects, not because we're humanitarians—although maybe we are—but because it makes good business sense and gives people a better sense of ownership in what we're doing.
There are some good examples of that in Madagascar right now, where we're building one of the world's biggest nickel mines for Sherritt International. We're a 5% owner in that mine, but we're implementing what we call the local resource development initiative, which we have implemented in South Africa, Mozambique, and Algeria right now, to employ local workers. In South Africa and Mozambique, we trained 9,000 construction workers who had never worked on an industrial site before. When I visited the second phase of the Mozal refinery and smelter in Mozambique, they had just poured metal six months ahead of time and tens of millions of dollars under budget. So working with a local workforce of 9,000 and local businesses, we had a very successful project, which the World Bank is now using as an example of resource development in the developing world.
I make that digression here to respond a little to Mr. Moist's comments about unemployment. As we build our construction business there, we'll use more and more local workers and we'll train them. We've had great success at working that way.
A final point is that we find free trade agreements very helpful. It's very important to have Canadian government leadership in establishing high-level contacts and interest in emerging markets and business frameworks. Free trade agreements, double-taxation agreements, investment protection agreements, what have you, these things facilitate business and attract two-way business between our countries.
One of the things I would like to see more of in free trade agreements, or associated with countries that are growing markets for Canada, is ways to facilitate business travel back and forth. Right now, the business visa situation for any country that requires a visa to come to Canada makes us completely uncompetitive with most of our OECD competitors in the United States or Europe or wherever. So it seems to me that when we're doing free trade agreements, we should be looking at exchanges of people as well. I'm not talking about people to come and work in factories, but business people coming to negotiate contracts or to visit Canadian projects and expertise.
We welcome the free trade agreement with Colombia. We hope it proceeds quickly, and we hope it will have a very positive effect on business between Canada and Colombia, and on Colombia, which we feel has made significant strides in recent years.
Thank you.