There would be cost increases. I think organizations like the Center for Automotive Research in Michigan have articulated those to be around 5%. Five per cent is important to a consumer, for sure, but 5% is also important to the competitiveness of our sector.
To be clear, the cost increases are in the repatriation of purchases to manufacturing towns all over the Great Lakes region on both sides of the border, as opposed to where their trend has been to go to low-cost jurisdictions, like China, Vietnam and Malaysia, to build at a global level. I think that is one of the saw-offs that isn't as clearly negative as some people have made it to be. The fact of the matter is that there are structural issues that need to be addressed in terms of the cost structure. A lot of those are provincial, and I see real movement in some of those, including the cost of electricity, from a Canadian government point of view. It really is a coordination with the province on targeting new investment. You're not going to land Mitsubishi alone, so you can go and sell the trade deal, but you'd better go with the province.
I give the same advice to the province, and I've certainly given this advice to both stripes. Getting new investments, greenfield investments, is like bidding for a professional franchise or the Olympics. There is a distaste in the public to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to land a General Motors plant. However, you know in your riding that when you lose one, your mindset changes a bit. I think it's incumbent on this government to communicate the benefits of going out and bidding for plants. The plants that left Windsor...they don't come back. The ROI for some of these investments is three years, both through the personal tax base and through the corporate tax base.
Everybody kind of shies away. Everybody's party shies away from having to be the one to defend it, but frankly, we lost Hyundai and Kia to Georgia because it outbid us. We lost Toyota and Subaru to Mississippi because it outbid us. One of things that's important in government is not to worry about how sometimes we have to do the tough things and go out and sell it, that we're going to be very aggressive. Yes, we're going to work on the price of electricity. I want to see it. But, damn it, we have to go out there and bid on this stuff.