Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
I'm Robert Blackburn, senior vice-president with SNC-Lavalin. I'm responsible for relations with government, international development banks, and, by serendipity, for our markets in sub-Saharan Africa. So I have a number of roles.
We support and welcome the government's commitment to growing and diversifying Canadian export markets, markets for exporters of goods and services, and investors. We welcomed the Prime Minister's statements about this, last weekend in Hawaii.
We're very focused on growing and diversifying our markets outside North America. We have only 3% of our business in the United States, but in Europe last year, excluding Russia, we had 7% of revenues of $6.3 billion, so about $453 million. Europe is an important market for us. We're in France, Belgium, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
We have about 11,000 employees outside Canada. We have 4,000 in Latin America, 3,000 in Europe, and 1,000 in Africa. We're focusing on building our presence not only in fast-growing markets but also in Europe, which is our second-largest source of imports and destination for exports and source of investment for Canada. So it's an important market. It doesn't have the fast growth characteristics perhaps of some of the other markets in the news, but it's a very important one.
We're active in Europe in the infrastructure field. We manage ten airports. We have ownership stakes in some of them and we're just building a new one on the French island of Mayotte, of all places. We're helping to arrange the financing and we're going to manage it for the next 15 years. We're also involved in light rail, industrial, mining, and various other sectors. So Europe is an important market for us.
We're optimistic. We're happy that there have now been nine successful rounds of the comprehensive economic and trade agreement negotiations with Europe. I know they're getting down to the tough issues now. We've been keeping track of these things.
Our interests, as you might expect, are for the free movement of people—business people, experts—back and forth among Canada and the European countries. We use our talent pool globally. We're active in about 100 countries and we move our people around, finding the best expertise for the projects we're undertaking. Right now, we have about 10,000 projects around the world. We couldn't micromanage things the way the government sometimes tries to micromanage things.
We would also like to see a comprehensive agreement on services. Milos talked about the negative list approach, which we think was the only way to go, that we would really realize some of our objectives. Mutual recognition of professional qualifications is also an important subject. We want to be treated without discrimination in infrastructure markets and in government procurement. There needs to be a credible, reliable, dispute settlement mechanism and a mechanism that could provide compensation when there is discriminatory treatment.
Just as a final point, I think it's great to see the provinces involved the way they have been in this negotiation. There was a hint of that two years ago in the stimulus package involving the provinces in an agreement with the United States on government procurement. My hope might be that the provinces' cooperation in that way in foreign markets might lead to some further cooperation among the provinces here in Canada in strengthening our own internal market, which still has a lot of impediments. Just go across the river and you may have to tear up a sidewalk because it wasn't built by the right kinds of workers.
Anyway, thank you very much. I'd be happy to take any questions, in English or French.