We need both government and the private sector, and both have an important role, but in an emergency—I think this is one of the key lessons—we don't allow the private sector to determine the allocation of vital resources. Let me give you an American example from that war story. Consider this: Pearl Harbor happened in December of 1941. In February of 1942, two months later, the last civilian automobile rolled off the assembly line in Detroit, and for the next four years their production and sale were basically illegal.
Those factories were busy and all of those workers were employed, but they were doing something else. They weren't doing that through the voluntary goodwill or patriotism of the big three automakers; they were doing it because they were ordered to do it.
We saw this in the Canadian wartime story as well. We saw over 100 prominent Canadian business leaders in the Second World War become C.D. Howe's dollar-a-year men. They played an instrumental role heading up some of these Crown corporations, serving as what they called controllers of these supply chains. Interestingly, they abandoned their private sector posts to become Howe's dollar-a-year men. They understood that to achieve speed and scale in a time of emergency requires state leadership. I think that's true again today.
We are losing today. We're not spending anything close to what we need to be spending. Sir Nicholas Stern argues that—