International Trade committee  I think I know who you're talking about. The original agreement happened at a time when about 80% of the vehicles made in North America were made in the Great Lakes region. There was the idea that for Great Lakes states, if we opened the door to Mexico or Canada, there was going to be some erosion.

International Trade committee  Yes. The current NAFTA rules say, if you want to sell a car to a consumer in any of the three countries, 62.5% of that car and 60% of the qualifying parts have to come from that region. The way we do it is that we track 29 parts components.

International Trade committee  I'm saying $6 billion to $8 billion of incremental purchases in automotive supplies manufactured in Canada annually, at full transition, from a baseline of $35 billion.

International Trade committee  Thank you. It's a pleasure to be back here, Madam Chair and members. Where are we, and how did we get here? We're discussing the attributes of the new NAFTA, having negotiated at an unprecedented speed and with a heretofore unseen bellicose and belligerent trading partner. This partner, our celebrated best friend, the United States, was bent on disrupting the global trading order with little regard for precedent or consequence.

International Trade committee  I think one of your staff took my speech to make copies for everybody. I'll do it extemporaneously, as I always do here.

International Trade committee  You know, the tariffs were a fair bit of madness. Somebody decided to put a tariff on a good that would be borne by consumers in his own country to prove a point that nobody understood. The fact of the matter is that for 10 months we all paid it. The Canadian counter-tariffs, which I thought were tactically important to do, in some cases were more disruptive to some of our members' business because of the very nature of that cross-border trade.

International Trade committee  There would be cost increases. I think organizations like the Center for Automotive Research in Michigan have articulated those to be around 5%. Five per cent is important to a consumer, for sure, but 5% is also important to the competitiveness of our sector. To be clear, the cost increases are in the repatriation of purchases to manufacturing towns all over the Great Lakes region on both sides of the border, as opposed to where their trend has been to go to low-cost jurisdictions, like China, Vietnam and Malaysia, to build at a global level.

International Trade committee  The challenge of getting the rules of origin in autos is recognizing that the current rules of origin were written in 1994 when the maximum amount of electronics in a car might be the trip computer where you press the button and reset. Now about 30% of the value of a vehicle—not the weight but the value—is in electronics, hard and soft.

International Trade committee  If you overlay the IT cluster map of North America with the automotive manufacturing cluster map of North America, the only place where the two overlap in a material way is in southwestern Ontario, with a real honourable mention to Montreal.

International Trade committee  It's $16 billion in incremental supply bridges annually.

International Trade committee  B.C., Ottawa to Windsor and Montreal area all will win that.

International Trade committee  In the CETA, there is tariff-free export of vehicles under a quota, and it's 100,000 a year shared with everybody. So what does CETA represent? Is it necessarily a singular business case to manufacture or export? It is an opportunity for current manufactures to diversify where their current plant's business is.

International Trade committee  You know, I make that pitch all over the world. I make it from a private sector standpoint, but I make it. The global automakers—not David's group, but small-g global—have moved to a trend, especially in the last couple of decades, of building where they sell. The Canadian market is saturated.

International Trade committee  I think it's a very complicated negotiation with a publicly traded company that has ticker symbol issues and distribution issues—

International Trade committee  Yes, there's way more to it.