Finance committee  Boy, I don't know where he came up with those numbers, but numbers along those lines are all over the map. You can easily spend $1.5 billion on an assembly plant in any of those jurisdictions. China is probably the least expensive, but China is a completely different entity. Real

Finance committee  He took me off his Christmas card list many, many, many months ago.

Finance committee  It's not necessarily wage, but compensation. Briefly, there are two portions. You have a hard wage and then there's a non-wage benefit—health care, pension plans, and things like that. Because of the structure of our health care in Canada primarily, but other benefits as well,

Finance committee  It's going to be real rough, and so far the unions—obviously there's a political side to the unions that's showing its face and kind of carrying the day. There's a non-political side, where these labour union leaders in automotive are some of the smartest anywhere in North Americ

Finance committee  Well, Mr. Hargrove is going to blame Korea. Unfortunately, it's not the fact that the Koreans aren't buying Canadian cars; it's the fact that Canadians aren't buying his cars. So you can do anything you want about Korea. They don't buy big gas guzzlers in Korea, and that's what

Finance committee  For the first hundred years of the automotive sector, the entry barriers to competing in automotive were so high that GM, Ford, and Chrysler were largely protected from international competition. In the last 15 or 20 years, those entry barriers have dropped and these global compa

Finance committee  There's no doubt that our high dollar is going to pose a real challenge in the future, but also, these are highly capital-intensive industries that can manage to survive in a high-dollar economy. It didn't stop Toyota from coming. Do you not think Toyota knew the dollar was str

Finance committee  I was deeply involved in the Toyota investments coming to Canada. I remember the officials there saying, “Do you understand why the U.S. south has to provide the incentives they do when we go down there?” Why? “It's because they can't compete with Ontario.” Don't forget that. O

Finance committee  And no doubt you're going to find those, but you don't stick a policy in place to address a cyclical issue like that. Pickup trucks are down because of the U.S. housing crisis, and it's the contractors who drive pickup trucks. We happen to produce pickup trucks in Oshawa, so we g

Finance committee  I keep trying to find this crisis in automotive, and I can't seem to find it.

Finance committee  Yes, but you've also got to educate the auto sector in terms of how to operate in that kind of environment. Remember, if you go through that auto sector, we had an industry that was highly protected with safeguards, and now we're in an industry where we can't do all that stuff we

Finance committee  I can't speak for forestry--I have no knowledge on that side--but on the automotive side, the demand has been there across North America. The auto industry classically is very cyclical. We currently are on the downside of that cycle, at least in the U.S. marketplace. In some r

Finance committee  Actually, I'm doing really well today, but I'm Canadian, so I have to downgrade it a bit.

Finance committee  Thank you very much. I feel a little bit odd because I'm actually coming from an industry that's in reasonably good shape and in a strong position to face the future. We're not without our warts, mind you, and I'll talk about some of those, but we seem to have done more right th