Thank you for the opportunity to be here.
At Gerdau Canada, we have three steel mills. We have one in Manitoba that produces specialty steels and two in Ontario, in Cambridge and Whitby. We employ over 1,300 employees directly in high-paying jobs.
With all our mills, and there are many mills, we are true recyclers with 100% of our raw material coming from metal scrap. This is very important for the world. We have over 1.6 million tonnes of capacity. We are not running at full asset capacity. I'd say that we're running probably below 70%. The reason is unfairly traded steel.
Our mills have state-of-the-art equipment. We have very skilled, trained workers and I'm proud to say that in the two Ontario mills, we haven't had a lost-time accident in more than five years. This is remarkable and I'm very proud to say it.
One point my colleagues covered is that in Canada, and mainly in Ontario, we produce the greenest steel in the world with 90% of our electricity coming from non-fossil sources, so we should be rewarded. It puts us in an even more competitive position in the world. Just to give you an idea about the CO2 emissions, if you look to our plants in Ontario and compare them to a plant overseas, the CO2 emissions are at least 10 times less. We believe that here we have a great opportunity to use steel that's going to power our economy, help to make the world a greener place, and help with climate change.
The biggest issue we face is unfairly traded steel. Personally, I was heavily involved in a rebar trade case in 2014 and 2015 against China, South Korea, and Turkey. We stopped those three countries, but at the same time we had six other countries dump even more steel in Canada. A few days from now we'll be in front of CITT again to see if we can win another fight against six countries: Belarus, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It's a constant battle.
We cannot compete against government. There is not the equipment or the process in place that will allow us to compete against a government. Very simply, that's how it is.
There are three ways that we believe the government can help us.
One is to make sure the trade remedy system is updated, fast, reliable, and will prevent any smart importer or exporter from finding loopholes. We applaud the government because we know the government is working on it.
Another one is the procurement policy. We should reward the low CO2 emitters and put everyone on a level playing field. As well, if we're going to pay for carbon taxes—and we believe this is what we need to do to make sure the world will be a good place for our grandchildren to live—the rules need to apply to everybody. Otherwise, it will be carbon leakage. You're going to put the steel business here out of work and it will be forced to buy steel from people who are not taking care of the environment.
The third point is that we need to be in alignment with the U.S. and make sure that Canada won't become a dumping ground.
Thank you for the opportunity and hopefully I'll be able to answer the questions.