It's been a while since I've been called Timothy, but thanks.
I'm Tim Carrie, from London, actually. I know the panel didn't come to London, so London has come to you.
Prior to my responsibility as a director of education for Unifor, I was the president of Unifor Local 27 in London, representing auto parts workers.
I'm going to name a few facilities: auto, the Ford plant in Talbotville; auto parts, Siemens; Dana, and I can go on to several others. Those are thousands and thousands of jobs.
I go back far enough to remember the debate on free trade with Brian Mulroney and I go back far enough to remember the race-to-the-bottom argument that we put forward. I go far enough back to recognize when NAFTA came into effect. All of the promises that I heard here and all the wishful thinking, I heard back then. But what have I seen? It has been job loss after job loss after job loss, and in manufacturing, the race to the bottom. The way that we've tried to maintain a few jobs was to negotiate downwards, with workers taking cuts just to keep the jobs. That is not fair trade.
I know when the panel was speaking, Lana was asked, “How can we stop them from going to Mexico?” I'm not going to answer that, but I'm going to tell you a way that you don't stop them from going to Mexico, a plan that doesn't work. When you eliminate the tariffs, when you eliminate the Auto Pact, which requires 60% Canadian content for vehicles that were sold in this country, that is certainly not going to stop jobs from going to Mexico; it's going to enhance more jobs going. When you allow a dollar to get artificially high, any economist who's really looking at it will tell you that it's not going to stop jobs from going. There are ways to stop it, but what I saw was governments always putting in place things to enhance it.