Actually, we ship very little. We roughly peaked in 2014 when these programs went into place. When I say Canadian exports, it's roughly about 23,000 vehicles, and that dropped precipitously in 2015, and further in 2016, for instance. We're now down to virtually zero exports. We're talking about probably fewer than 10 vehicles.
One of the key things here has been that Brazilians are facing a 40% to 50% tax on car imports. The reduction or exemption, for instance, of what we call the “industrial product tax” is something that would be very welcome and would help us in that regard. That's a clear example of the heavy taxation that takes place on vehicles coming into that country from abroad.
You have multiple layers of fees, multiple layers in terms of import licensing, and so forth, not to mention the fact that when you bring in a vehicle to one of the Mercosur countries, let's say, under the CET tax of 35%, and you ship that vehicle within the Mercosur to countries, it's duplicated again. You pay that again as it enters the other market. This cascading effect takes place over and over again. It's clearly all one way in terms of what we have coming into Canada, but it's very small at this point in time.
The Holy Grail, as you may know, Mr. Carrie, is to get a global product mandate for our plants here in Canada. Ford, for instance, has the Ford Edge that has that mandate. The people I work with work daily to try to keep the mandates that we have here, but also to expand them to global mandates if we possibly can. That's the key here: how can we open up these markets, get rid of these non-tariff barriers, or at least deal with them, and then put into place appropriate dispute settlement mechanisms that are efficient in that they're legally binding? The timing and the agility of those settlement dispute mechanisms are absolutely critical.
Also importantly, and this is what was so good about why we supported CETA to the extent that we did, was we struck an agreement with two mature markets. We struck an agreement that acknowledged and actually integrated the fact that we are an integrated industry with the U.S. and put in place derogations or placeholders, if you will, so that when the U.S. did get an agreement with Europe, then we could definitely use accumulated content under the NAFTA, for instance, to meet the requirements of the CETA.
That's what is so critical. We have to negotiate for autos on the basis of the integrated industry and on the basis of the integrated market in North America. We have to trade as a bloc, negotiate as a bloc, and open those markets along the lines that I've suggested.