Madam Speaker, my question for the Minister of Industry was along the lines of why so much investing was going into the United States and Mexico and why out of the last 19 assembly plants that were built in North America only one had come to Canada.
I do not want to give the minister a lot of credit but I want to read his response to the investment climate. He said:
Canada has the most attractive investment climate in the world. Given our economic circumstances, lowering taxes, stable and low interest rates, low inflation, productive workforce, it is a great place to invest.
I will give him some credit because there is some value to that. However we still only have one of the assembly plants. In the last 12 months we have been on the verge of losing three assembly plants, one in my hometown of Windsor, one in Oakville and one in Sainte-Thérèse.
There is an opportunity for us to save the plant in Windsor, which is to replace it with a new, modern assembly plant, and there is an opportunity to save the production in the plant in Oakville, but the government has to move.
I have a report that was prepared by the industry department. It is called U.S. State Programs for New Investment. It has about 20 pages. It was prepared during the early part of December 2002. At the back of the report is a chart showing the percentage of investments in the plant, both in brownfield and greenfield plants, greenfield being new production and brownfield being existing production with expansion going on.
If we go down the chart we see that it has a list of all of the new plants that I mentioned, plus a number of plants that were being expanded or added on to.
What we see in this is that in spite of that investment climate that the minister spoke about, the reality is that we are being more than matched and, in fact, out-classed by the U.S. and Mexico.
We see that one plant, a brownfield site actually in Alabama, received a 66% investment from state and local governments. We are not even in the ball park.
We lost a production line for Windsor this past summer, DaimlerChrysler. It went down to Georgia and Georgia invested 43% in that plant. It did not matter that we had medicare in this country, that the health costs for labour were lower here and that our dollar was lower. That is something this department has to learn.
We have to get on to this or we are going to lose those two plants, the one in Windsor and the one in Oakville.