It's an honour to be with you. This is my first opportunity to have a discussion with members of Parliament.
We hear a lot of discussion about “Buy American” and how it's affecting us, but we hear a lot of theoretical discussions on the impact of “Buy American”. We in fact have been hurt quite significantly in the last two years. We had to take quite rapid and drastic measures. We didn't have the power of negotiation when we had to establish a manufacturing facility in the U.S. We had to act to protect our future projects.
As we heard in the briefing on how the Buy American negotiations were taking place between the Canadian and U.S. representatives, at the same time we were seeing projects being lost, projects we had worked on for three years. They used our designs and our proprietary and technical information, and towards the eleventh hour we were told we were no longer on the project.
We had units. We actually had deliveries at the port of Los Angeles that were held. The customer was not taking them, and they were held at the port. The State of California learned about the situation and actually felt sorry for us, and they gave us a one-time exemption to deliver the product.
To react, we had to take a facility in upstate New York, in Plattsburgh. We would have had 40 employees in the Montreal area, and we were looking at Ontario as well, and we moved to Plattsburgh. Now we have a production facility in Plattsburgh. That's the only solution.
What you are doing here and after as negotiations doesn't make a difference. You have the government ruling. You have the threshold values at $7.8 million. That $7.8 million threshold value represents 80% of the projects.
There are on-the-ground U.S. competitors who know how to work around these rulings and these agreements. They sent protest letters to the counties and municipalities that wanted to buy from us. They threatened to take them to court. They threatened them with losing the stimulus funding that they were receiving from the federal government. The municipalities in the U.S. are not very educated in terms of knowing the law and how it applies.
Their first reaction was that instead of buying from us and taking the risk, they would rather buy from U.S.-based suppliers. Even with our production facility in place in Plattsburgh--and we're spending $2 million just modifying the facility so we can test in it--the U.S. competitors are still putting pressure on their municipalities to not take our product, which we are already committed to building in the U.S. This is the reality on the ground.
If the negotiations around agreements are not 100% without any conditions, without any threshold values, without any borders that separate the U.S. economy from the Canadian economy, they will not be applicable on the ground.
We have to stop looking at what we need to change in the U.S. The U.S. has their own problems. They have a 12% unemployment rate. They will not be able to negotiate more than what they have. We need to focus on what we can do in Canada. We have other markets we can go to. We have to educate our municipalities that still favour U.S.-based manufacturing even though we are the market leaders in our category.
When we try to sell in Ontario or in Quebec, 15 minutes away from our home base, we find we're actually out-manoeuvred by the U.S. competitors that put the pressure on us in the U.S. They stretch our means and make our means thin in terms of financing. Then they can come and compete with us in our own backyard, and they can win against us. So we're hurting on both sides.
We want a strategy to be developed in Canada to help us to regain strength. We want a rescue package to help us do whatever extra we need to do in the U.S. to regain our projects in the U.S., and we want to use that assistance to open up other markets.
We learned one thing, which surprised us. We thought we had a good agreement called NAFTA. When we went full speed and focused on the U.S. to develop the market, we were led to believe there were no restrictions between the Canadian and U.S. economies. That did not prove to be true. What we are seeing now with the new agreement is that it's leading us, the manufacturers, to think that there are actually reciprocities between the U.S. and Canadian economies. It's not true. We know what the situation is. We can go to Europe, and we can go to underdeveloped regions in the world, and that's where we can make the difference.
Also, what we're asking for is more focus on growing Canadian technology companies. We have to work from Canada and go abroad all the time, and most of the companies we deal with actually are subsidiaries. We need to grow our own technology, our own brand name as Canadian technology, and promote that outside of the U.S., outside of the economy that we depend on so heavily.
These are the things that I want to pass on to you as our experiences. We lost specific projects in the U.S. As for the amount, between lost projects and discounts we had to make, we lost over $80 million. For a small company that we started in 2005, that's a huge impact. We need from you the recommendations to create attention to what you can do to help us in Canada, knowing that we had to go through having to expand our financing to build a facility in the U.S. and that we still have to build a facility in Canada. We need you to approve some kind of financing that applies to those of us who have over 60% or 70% of our sales concentrated in the U.S.