Oh, yes. I've probably written more about multipliers than any other subject. They're one of the least understood things that Statistics Canada produces. The usual multiplier that people calculate is the ripple effect in other industries. What that rewards is industries that have a lot of linkages to other industries. Manufacturing is the poster boy for having lots of linkages to other industries. Manufacturing also imports in the auto industry and ICT goods half their inputs. Manufacturers buy their inputs from all over the world, all over the country. Construction or oil and gas don't. They have very low multipliers.
When you build a home, you're basically paying the guys who build your home. There's a little bit of materials, but there are very low multipliers. That's the problem with multipliers. They reward industries that have linkages to other industries.
The better way to look at it is the GDP multiplier: what your impact on GDP is, not what your impact on other industries is. When you look at that—I did a paper on this three or four years ago; I can dig out the results for you—you find that manufacturing in fact has the lowest GDP multiplier, and industries like oil and gas and construction have the highest GDP multiplier.