Good afternoon. Please excuse us for being late. We were half way through a club sandwich downstairs when the clerk told us that we had to come up. So here we are.
My name is André Coutu. I represent the Groupe Export Agroalimentaire Québec-Canada, which specializes in agri-food. In Quebec, we have 400 companies in the sector. We are certainly the Government of Quebec's “muscle” in terms of exports. We also hold shares in SIAL Canada, SIAL Montreal and SIAL Toronto. Those are major international agri-food showcases.
I have prepared a summary of our 2015 manufacturing sales in Canada. It will only take a few minutes.
On page 2, you can see that our foreign sales come to $108 billion, with 24% of that going to Quebec, 42% to Ontario and 14% to Alberta.
The growth in food exports in Quebec added 2,050 jobs and $474 million to the GDP in 2015. Clearly, it is a major source of job creation and revenue. So it will come as no surprise that the Groupe Export Agroalimentaire Québec-Canada is in favour of free-trade agreements, whether with Europe or with the rest of the world.
On page 4, you will see that Quebec's main exports come to $7.5 billion in foreign sales, 72% of which come from the American market. We talk about the American market as if we dominate it, but that is not quite correct. We only know a small part of it. We have to continue our efforts in that market.
On the next page, you will see that Quebec's food imports, valued at $7.5 billion, are increasing. We can thank our lucky stars that the United States saved our bacon, if you will, last year. Our sales to that country increased by 23% last year, while our sales to the rest of the world decreased by 20%. For the European Union, the decrease was 54%, as a result of which we are accumulating a huge deficit; for Japan, it was about 9%.
On page 6, you can see that our trade deficit with Europe is now up to $1.7 billion. So it is important that we look for new ways to counter that trend. I will come back to that later.