Mr. Speaker, I have listened with great interest to my colleagues from both the Liberals and the Conservatives talk about this in a protectionist sense. They ought to open up their eyes because the world has been doing it for years and continues to do it.
The most recent piece about the buy America act simply highlighted what has been going on for the past 55 years. In fact, it is slightly more than that. The buy America act was enacted some 50-odd years ago. It is not new. It is not an Obama situation.
The reason that folks finally paid attention is because of the economic downturn and the huge number of dollars that the federal government in the U.S. pushed into its system and said to give it to state and local governments to decide what to do. The 50 U.S. states have a buy America act. Their local governments buy local.
The reason Bombardier has a plant in Plattsburgh instead of the Americans importing from Thunder Bay is because New York State has a buy New York State policy when it comes to buses. That is why the Plattsburgh plant and the supplier park that surrounds it has thousands of jobs that should be in Canada where Bombardier is the home company.
However, because of the decision it made a long time ago, that is exactly where the plant relocated and it is not alone. The European consortium that builds buses also happens to be in Plattsburgh, just down the road from the Bombardier plant.
With regard to how much of the economy we are talking about, my friends on the other side of the aisle and down the way think that the whole economy is about to be protected. We are talking about 23% of the total economy. Those are the latest numbers for what local, provincial and territorial governments would buy via their procurement policies, which leaves 77% of the economy open to be governed by international trade deals.
It is really transparent, it seems to me, in the NAFTA accord where chapter 10 talks about there not being any provisions to stop local governments from having local procurement. They can make the decisions.
In the province of Ontario local government is mandated by the provincial government, having been a member of municipal government previously, to develop its own procurement policies and the policies are entirely written up by the local government.
I had the great pleasure, starting about two years ago, of travelling to meet with nearly all of the municipal governments in the Niagara region and asking them to consider procurement policies that looked at buying Canadian. Basically, all of them agreed because it really boils down to one common element.
When it comes to government, it collects money. It does not sell things to people. It does not make things for sale. It taxes people and collects their money. People entrust it to government and then they want it to appropriate that money and spend it wisely.
One of the questions I put to mayors in my region was this. If they are collecting money from their neighbours, why would they not spend it on them? It is their money, after all. Why would they give it to some foreign national? Why would they send it across the way? Of course, most say they get a better price there, it is more competitive, and that is how they drive the competitiveness. My reply to that is, how much was saved? Usually it is pennies. If they are lucky, it is a penny on the dollar.
If people are laid off because we decided to buy what they make somewhere else, what is the cost to the municipality? Initially, it is EI, so it is a cost to the federal government, which really is all of us in this country. At some point in time, if that person does not get a job, people go on social assistance, which in Ontario is borne by the municipality.
If we look at the true cost of what these things really do and factor that into the whole equation, we will find that buying local is not only smart but it builds community. It does not put us at a disadvantage. It does not hamper us from getting good quality materials. It does not hamper our competitiveness. When it comes to large purchases involving hundreds of millions of dollars, when it comes to infrastructure for buses and rail cars, if we decide to buy somewhere else, Europe for instance, it is our workers who are laid off.
As we have seen in this country, 400,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared. None of them have been replaced. It was not about a sense of being competitive and replacing those jobs with something else. They are gone.
We, in this House, are all too well aware of what has happened to the economy of this country. If we do not decide to invest in our own, who will? Who will if not us? We speak for all Canadians. We speak for all of those who have come here and if we are not going to speak for them, it is hard for me to imagine that Nokia is going to speak for them in Finland, or that some plant and some manufacturer in Stuttgart is going to speak for Canadians from there. Canadians are looking to us to speak for them and we should. That is our job. That is the role we play.
We are not looking at closing, putting up walls and closing doors, and saying we do not wish to trade with the rest of the world. We understand we are a trading nation. The world understands we are a trading nation. In fact, the world looks at us and says the Canadians really do not get it, so let us sell our stuff to them because they do not have procurement policies.
Every major manufacturing country in this world has a procurement policy, whether it is Mexico, Japan, Germany, U.K., or whether it is the Americans who we trade nearly 80% of our products with. All have inside their walls, inside their country, local procurement policies. Yet, we refuse in this country, at least at the federal level to this point in time, to acknowledge that. At the local level across this country there are quite a few municipalities which are saying they are going to take the initiative because one of the fallacies about the NAFTA was that somehow provinces and municipalities could not enact buy Canadian. How wrong they were. Of course, they got that advice from the federal cousins. Their federal counterparts said they cannot do that, NAFTA says no.
Of course, when the buy American act raised its head and all that money poured in, all of a sudden it became oops, now we need to change it. Now we see the Minister of International Trade down in the U.S. cap in hand, trying to say, “Let us do something about the buy American act”. We are trying to negotiate a deal with nothing in our hand. We have an empty cap, hoping for coppers to be placed in that cap. That is not what we ought to be doing. We should be fighting for Canadian jobs because it really is about making sure they are protected.
What do municipalities buy? In my riding a town called Thorold enacted a buy Canadian policy. In fact, when officials go to the local hardware store just to buy a shovel, they make sure it is a Canadian shovel. Their lapel pins have “Made in Canada”, contrary to what we have received as part of our allotment of Canadian pins made in China. There is a community that understands about standing up for its citizens, its workers. What do their citizens say about that resolution? They are in full support.
One survey asked about municipal transit buying buses. Specifically, 9 out of 10 Canadians surveyed said we should buy Canadian buses if they are made here. Just so everyone knows, we make buses in this country. We make very good buses in this country. But I guess the Minister of National Defence did not think we made good enough buses to give to the defence department, to give to our brave soldiers overseas and our soldiers who are here in this country. He decided to buy them from Germany. We could have made them in Chatham, no more than five or six hours drive from here. We could have made those buses, but instead we shipped them over and allowed the Germans to make those buses.
If we had said we will like to build buses for the German army, imagine the response of the chancellor of Germany. I am sure she would have said, “Not on, we will make our own buses, thank you very kindly, for our troops” and that is exactly what we should have done. The difference in what it cost for those buses in Germany versus here was infinitesimal. Add in the cost of what happened to the workers in that plant in Chatham who are now laid off and the cost now is disproportionate because it would have been cheaper to make them in Chatham than have them shipped from Germany. The same quality buses, the same type of things that we were looking at, and that situation can be extrapolated across this country into municipalities, into the provinces, so that we will put our workers back to work.
We are going to collect their money as I said earlier and it is their money. If we are going to make an investment in anyone, it ought to be them because it is their money after all. They would be grateful for the fact that we thought it was important to invest in them and not send it overseas.