Industry committee  No, and I take great offence at the comment that we're not reinvesting. In fact I'd invite any one of you to come to our facilities in Guelph, even the one we're closing, and look at the millions of dollars we've been investing in the last three years. We've been consistently inv

Industry committee  We certainly believe that Canadian manufacturers can compete. I think it's important that everyone on this committee understand that Canadian manufacturers can compete. We wouldn't be here if we didn't think so. But government is our partner in that enterprise, and government is

Industry committee  If the taxes we paid on our product were equal to the taxes paid on an imported product, there's no doubt that we would be beat the Chinese day in and day out.

Industry committee  I'm the third generation. My grandfather started the business almost 77 years ago.

Industry committee  We close our first factory at the end of this month in Guelph. We have three facilities in Guelph; one of them is closing at the end of this month.

Industry committee  We have partners in China. We source from China; we don't own any facilities in China. We have trade alliances and joint ventures from a collaborative manufacturing standpoint. We have opened a new facility in Mexico and are expanding our operations in Ohio.

Industry committee  I'm not here to make comment on politics. I think any government, from any of the parties, that helps change this tax gap is moving in the right direction. Certainly the GST proportionally gives the importers a bigger tax advantage than it does domestic manufacturers, that's true

Industry committee  We'll start with China. The tax stamp is based on the taxes that we pay in Canada. Another way to look at it from a government's perspective is that these are the taxes you collect. So for every appliance--refrigerator, freezer, dehumidifier, microwave, whatever it is--that we im

Industry committee  I don't. I'm not qualified to really answer that question. What I can tell you is that we do extensive research on the products imported--not the process, but the products--and I can tell you that the products imported from China, from reputable manufacturers, which for the mos

Industry committee  In this example--and it's a hypothetical example based on industry statistics--the example in 2002 is that it's a 5% net profit. That's net income before taxes. And that's not untypical of what most industry was doing prior to the increase in the dollar and the increase in commod

Industry committee  There are two answers to that question. First, what have we had to take out? What a lot of manufacturing has done.... You're quite correct, a 43% increase in the dollar is equivalent to a 30% reduction in our selling price, the inverse of the impact of the dollar. What industry h

Industry committee  As I mentioned on the second-last slide of our presentation, to reduce our income taxes we would have to raise our consumption taxes. The GST and the PST would have to increase between 25% and 200% to try to compensate for that decline in tax revenues from the income tax. It has

Industry committee  The current tax gap in the appliance industry is about 11% of total product costs. As I said, that's more than labour. It's more than the advantage of labour that many people refer to. And this committee I think appropriately characterized that in their interim report in June. We

Industry committee  Thank you, that's an excellent question. You're asking how we wrestle with the challenge of taxes that are paid on an imported good, of $18, versus taxes on a manufactured good, of $52.28. I think the biggest thing the committee has recognized is that manufacturing in this coun

Industry committee  The challenge is it requires a lot of political will. Changing our tax base is extremely challenging. What we have to recognize is that China's tax model, as well as many countries' tax model--including not too far south, where we have another facility in the state of Ohio--is mo