Thanks very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
In 2008, the city of St. Thomas was often used as the poster child for the recession that took place, and we've really rebounded back in the decade since then. We've seen all of those buildings that were vacated by companies like Sterling Trucks, Lear Canada and A. Schulman Canada get filled by other companies that have come from various places: from Canada, from the U.S. and from overseas.
We've been extremely fortunate to grow back from that point. However, as Canada continues to shift to a more service-oriented economy, which has been happening over the last few decades, I think it's important to recognize that a lot of that growth is happening primarily in the larger centres. In small cities like St. Thomas, we're effectively a very strong representation of how manufacturing affects small communities. In fact, with our population of 40,000 and our labour force of 20,000, 5,000 of those 20,000 jobs are in the manufacturing sector. If you look at that as 25% of our labour force that is directly affected by manufacturing and another several thousand that are impacted indirectly, you will see that there's a significant impact when you impose trade barriers.
I know that it's not the fault of anyone in here or anyone in our government, but it's a crazy time that we're working in right now. It has created a lot of challenges for our local businesses.
In our region, we use the focus on manufacturing as a tool to try to attract more manufacturing, as people look to clusters. We work with a group called the Southwestern Ontario Marketing Alliance, a member-based organization of seven other municipalities that are very much like St. Thomas. Through that group, we've recognized that we have some impressive foreign investment in our area, primarily in the automotive sector. We have the largest Japanese manufacturing investment in all of Canada in our little region. Any of the news around auto tariffs is always scary for regions like ours, where manufacturing is the bread and butter of our communities.
I'll talk a little bit more about the concern that we have locally. I spoke with one of our local businesses, and I'll give you just a very brief summary of some of its concerns. They're probably not much different from some that will be shared a little bit later on. This is a company whose main product is made from base metals—aluminum and steel. Because it has a U.S. parent company, it's required to purchase the majority of its products from the U.S.
As a result of the increased demand for domestic steel in the U.S., steel suppliers have taken the opportunity to raise some of their prices by as much as 20% over 2017 levels. Given that much of that product was already sold before then, it's up to the company now to absorb that cost. The border crossings have slowed down for this company, and the broad range of input subject to tariffs has significantly increased its costs, lowering its competitiveness and forcing it to question the feasibility of its Canadian location. It has even become impossible, in some cases, to have intercompany transfers of technology, of components, for anything from service to new development. That medium-sized company—say 30 to 50 employees—represents an economic impact of tens of millions of dollars in Canada, and it's only one example. We have dozens more in St. Thomas that are just like that, some larger and some smaller, and across our region there are many more like that.
In my role, I have the opportunity to speak with a lot of businesses, and the one thing that they're looking for is stability. That's true for tariffs, for the Canadian dollar and for trade agreements. Trade uncertainty is a huge challenge for companies in our region and across Canada. While we recognize that there's not a lot that we can do about it at the local level, what we want to do is to just try to voice their feelings to groups like yourselves and ensure that they can continue to do what they want to do, which is to invest in Canada.
Thank you.