Finance committee  I will say this. When you talk about what people say is incentives, one of the largest suppliers has done some analytical work on this point. When we talk about incentives, people are somewhat auto-fatigued, but it's an investment. It has a return on investment. The government ge

Finance committee  From a sales perspective the picture is a little different from a production standpoint. I'm not sure whether you mean sales or production.

Finance committee  For sales, we've come off 2008 and 2009, which is probably one of the darkest periods ever in the history of the automobile industry. That was one of the all-time lows; the market dropped off precipitously, literally overnight. Since then, year over year we've experienced continu

Finance committee  We see this as being absolutely critical. Right now, if you apply and you're successful, the money you get is taxed in the first year you get it. In other words, you don't receive the full benefit of that incentive, and that in fact is the issue here. Other jurisdictions that put

Finance committee  From our perspective, there was the beyond the border initiative, which was introduced roughly in 2011, that identified several issues but also had several recommendations in its work plan, all focused on how we can make the Canada-U.S. border, for instance.... When we talk about

Finance committee  Thanks very much, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon, honourable members. I'm very pleased to be here—and thank you for the invitation—representing Fiat Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors. Together these companies are responsible for about 60% of all vehicle production in Canada, and

Industry committee  I think I would support those comments as well. Part of it is the way the companies are structured. The engineering facilities, for instance, where we do innovative work and research and development, have been historically located in head offices elsewhere. Pulling those project

Industry committee  Yes. I think that's less important to large manufacturers, but it's still important. It's certainly important to small and medium enterprises, absolutely.

Industry committee  Tariffs are different.

Industry committee  I think somebody commented earlier on why wouldn't we extend these things. I also mentioned in that context that industry needs certainty. Certainty does not mean knowing whether that policy is going to be in place three years from now or not, or whether that AIF is going to be a

Industry committee  Sorry, if I may, we need to get ahead of the curve here a bit. We have governments at both levels saying, “Why wouldn't we be part of demonstrations of autonomous vehicles”, and things like that. Quite frankly, those decisions were made five years ago. We need to get ahead of the

Industry committee  That specifically is hard to do on the basis that some of these jurisdictions don't disclose that, companies don't disclose ultimately what the deal was, so to speak. I mentioned earlier in my remarks the Canadian Automotive Partnership Council. I strongly urge the committee to

Industry committee  It's a shift, but I don't think it's a shift away from manufacturing. We still have to manufacture vehicles. We've most recently heard announcements in conjunction with the collective agreements. These are new commitments by these companies in terms of the manufacturing, and so t

Industry committee  I think the R and D is essential to the companies and to the industry, but a lot of it goes on elsewhere. There's so much of this going on, and we're so resource constrained at this point in time, and we have such capacities and universities and research hubs here with such capac

Industry committee  No, we believe it is doing its job. It has done its job to date. There's always room for improvement, but our most important point is that it needs to continue. Our regulatory agencies should be working together, right from the point of research that goes into a regulatory devel