Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here.
I'll start with a few quick words about Linamar. We're a diversified manufacturing company, primarily in the auto parts business. We also supply commercial vehicles, off-highway vehicles, energy markets, and access equipment under the brand name Skyjack, where we make scissor lifts, boom lifts, and tele-handlers. There's one out front, thank you very much. In our vehicle business, we manufacture precision metallic components and subassemblies. We're mainly a machining and assembly company, but we've expanded recently into casting and forgings as well. We focus on the engine, transmission, and driveline systems of the vehicle as well as the body.
In 2015 sales for Linamar were $5.2 billion. We should be over $6 billion this year, which would be a new record for us. Our current forecast for 2020 is to continue to grow our business both globally and right here in Canada. We're currently booked for $7.7 billion out in 2020. We have 24,000 employees. We're manufacturing in 11 countries in 57 facilities. The largest by far is right here in Canada. We have more than 9,000 employees and 23 plants in Canada, which has grown significantly over the last five or six years as well.
I think that there is a lot of rhetoric, which I'm sure that all of you have heard and read about, that Canadian manufacturing is not competitive. I have to say I completely disagree with that premise. I think that competitiveness drives out of two key factors.
One is innovation in the products that we're designing, the processes that we design to make those parts, and the efficiency with which we run our operations. When I look at our costs in Canada, they are globally competitive. We manage our labour costs very carefully and we're constantly working to improve productivity every single day through the ideas of every single employee on how we can do things better.
Our labour burden rates, if we look at the combinations of statutory and non-statutory burden rates, are the lowest here in Canada as a percent of our labour costs than in any of the countries we operate in globally. Our productivity, our efficiency, and our purchasing strength in our Canadian operations are by far the best that we have globally. Certainly our Canadian plants are our most productive globally.
Other benefits are here in Canada. Our taxes are lower than in the U.S. and many of the other jurisdictions that we operate in. The support that we are getting from our government is fantastic in terms of SR and ED tax credits as well as in other ways our government is helping to support innovation. In fact, our SR and ED system is one of the most beneficial globally, I think only surpassed by France, in terms of support for innovation, which again is so critical to competitiveness.
So the bottom line is: are we winning business or not? The answer is, absolutely. We're winning hundreds of millions of dollars of new business for our Canadian facility. In fact, in the last three years, we have won $2 billion of annual sales for our Canadian facilities alone. More than half of that was well before the Canadian dollar moved to where it is. The Canadian dollar has very little impact on our business.
If I look back over the last several years since 2009, we've increased our sales just in Canada by 160%. That's almost three times. We've grown our Canadian employee base from 5,000 employees to more than 9,000. We've spent over a billion dollars in new capital just in our Canadian facilities and we've improved our productivity by 50% in that time frame, which, as noted, is our best globally.
To me it's really frustrating to hear these constant reports saying that Canadian manufacturing is not competitive, that we're shrinking, that we're not investing, and that we're not productive—that last one really upsets me—when that's absolutely not our story. I know it's not the story of a lot of other great companies. I think we should spend a little bit more time talking about the positives that can help inspire people to do the same, instead of telling ourselves that we're not productive, which doesn't inspire anything but maybe depression.
We will continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in our Canadian plants. We have an enormous amount of work that we're launching right now in our plants here in Ontario.
I am now going to talk about trade. How does trade fit into all of this?