Thank you.
My name is Veso Sobot. I am an engineer with IPEX. We manufacture plastic pipe for construction. If you take a look under your sink when you go home tonight, late at night—my goodness, you guys have stamina—you'll see black pipe under there. It's probably our stuff. We make the grey electrical pipe at the side of your house, the blue water main pipe out in the streets and the green sewer pipe.
We were founded in 1949 in Toronto. Our founders escaped Estonia and got to Toronto. They started making hula hoops at night and selling them during the day. Within three years, they made their first million dollars. Our founder said, look, this hula hoop thing might be a fad, so we'd better diversify. They straightened out the hula hoop, and that's how we got into the pipe business. Today we've made enough pipe to go around the world about 200 times.
Of course, very important to us is the U.S. trade relationship. We have 15 plants in Canada, five in Ontario. We now have 10 plants in the United States. In 2009, when President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which called for “buy America”, we were shut out of the U.S. market for probably 12 months. It was devastating to us. We lost long-standing customers. We've never been able to regain them. We also lost some logistical chains that we had access to. It took about 12 months for Canada to negotiate a Canadian exemption to buy America.
Here's my bottom-line recommendation to the group: Please pass USMCA, or CUSMA, as soon as possible. Lock in the gains that we have, but please understand that there are no protections in CUSMA against America doing buy American again. They can cut us off tomorrow and we won't be able to ship into the United States tomorrow. You might say, well, you have 10 plants in the States, so you should be okay, but the truth is that a lot of those plants have specialties. We ship product amongst ourselves. Product that's made in Chicago or in Michigan comes back to Toronto for certain products. Products that are made in North Carolina come back to Toronto and vice versa. Although we have some flexibility, we don't have huge flexibility.
My bottom line there, Madam Chair, is that if your folks could consider some sort of fund just in case America cuts us off again, some sort of fund that would help Canadian manufacturers if they were injured because America decided to implement buy America again, that would be wonderful—sort of like how you did for steel and aluminum, which was very effective and appropriate. It gave a little bit more security to Canadian industry.
I would add one more thing. In the new NAFTA, article 32.11 talks about Mexico's exemption to certain buy America issues. We don't know exactly how this will all play out. It would be wise of us to take a close look at article 32.11 and check to see whether Mexico has a bit of an advantage on us or not. If the article doesn't give them an exemption on buy America, that's great. It will prevent Canadian companies from moving their plants to Mexico and shipping back into the U.S.A.
As our bottom line, please pass USMCA as fast as you can. Let's lock in the gains, but let's also continue to work to see if we can make this better as time moves on.