First off—and we were talking about this before the committee started—last year was a record year for output for manufacturing in the country and for value-added exports, which is great news.
As we discussed, the challenge is that we're still not clicking on all cylinders. We're behind what the U.S. is doing, for example, and a lot of that comes down to investment. We've seen a significant lag in investment in this country over the last number of years. It tends to be that economic growth follows investment, so measures in the fall economic statement were critical. For example, with the ACCA measures, we saw an immediate kick in investment in Canadian manufacturing as soon as they were introduced, which we also saw in previous governments when they were introduced, and those are critical.
I'm optimistic that the elimination of steel and aluminum tariffs will go a long way to settling some of the uncertainty. That's maybe even bigger than ending the ratification of Bill C-100 and CUSMA overall between the three countries. That was a significant drag. That was obviously a critical step to even get us here today. Again, I commend the negotiators and the team inside the government. You got rid of that because that was the critical step that was weighing things down.
From an employment perspective, things are great, but the biggest problem we have is a lack of skilled labour in this country with skills levelling at all levels of the company. If we don't start solving some of the skills gaps that we have, that investment is going to dry up entirely.