Finance committee  I had actually preconceived that this would be the next question, if it came up. I want to turn you around on your ear on that. Four of the seven bestsellers in Canada are built in Canada. The Civic has been first for 10 years, and the Corolla is number two. The Sierra kicks in once in a while from Oshawa, and the Caravan manages to kick in around seven.

Finance committee  By the same token, if you look at the Canadian content levels of American-built cars, where Canadian parts have been shipped and put into American-built cars, these cars are also coming back after being produced and sold in this system. Anything that levers towards a better U.S. economy will lever towards a better Canadian economy.

Finance committee  Thank you for your question, Mr. Laforest. There will always be some difficulty, and we've seen as evidence in the American example that they were crushed with 700,000 transactions that all had to be verified and confirmed, and also that the government was forced to issue cheques and funds directly to the car companies, which meant 20,000 registrations and 700,000 disbursements.

Finance committee  There's a complete system underneath what I'm presenting here that I don't present or profess to everyone. I'm off to Washington next week to do the after-clunkers program for America. Hopefully Canada will benefit. The idea there is that actually the car would remain. If there was a decent seven-, eight- or nine-year-old car brought to a dealership, it would remain at the dealership until somebody who was lesser-privileged who had a qualifying vehicle, 10 or 15 years old, regardless, or with high mileage or low fuel economy....

Finance committee  I have two or three more points, and that's it.

Finance committee  Eleventh, it mitigates our oil sands production and our pollution outputs. Twelfth, it reduces our fuel consumption and lessens our import oil demands. Thirteenth, it supports an industry with a heavy prior federal and provincial investment that is obviously not showing a return currently.

Finance committee  Good afternoon. I'm Fraser Young. I'm with the Green Vehicle Exchange, a non-partisan, non-lobbied organization of my own that's spent two and a half years advancing a significant and profound system that I've developed and designed for rapidly extracting old cars and polluters from the roads, similar to the cash for clunkers program that we're all very well aware of.